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Articulate can be an adjective or a verb.

articulate used as an adjective:

  1. clear, effective
  2. especially, speaking in a clear or effective manner
    "She’s a bright, articulate young woman."
  3. able to bend or hinge at certain points or intervals
    "The robot arm was articulate in two directions."

Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →

articulate used as a verb:

  1. To make clear or effective.
  2. To speak clearly; to enunciate.
    "I wish he’d articulate his words more clearly."
  3. To explain; to put into words; to make something specific.
    "I like this painting, but I can’t articulate why."
  4. To bend or hinge something at intervals, or to allow or build something so that it can bend.
    "an articulated bus"
  5. to attack a note, as by tonguing, slurring, bowing, etc.
    "Articulate that passage heavily."
  6. to form a joint or connect by joints
    "The lower jaw articulates with the skull at the temporomandibular joint."

Verbs are action words and state of being words. Examples of action words are: ran, attacking, dreamed. Examples of "state of being" words are: is, was, be. Learn more →

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What type of word is articulate?

As detailed above, 'articulate' can be an adjective or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adjective usage: She’s a bright, articulate young woman.
  2. Adjective usage: The robot arm was articulate in two directions.
  3. Verb usage: I wish he’d articulate his words more clearly.
  4. Verb usage: I like this painting, but I can’t articulate why.
  5. Verb usage: an articulated bus
  6. Verb usage: Articulate that passage heavily.
  7. Verb usage: The lower jaw articulates with the skull at the temporomandibular joint.

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of articulate are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of articulate, and guess at its most common usage.

Word Type

For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.

The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.

Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.

Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).

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