Word Type
Average can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.
average used as a noun:
- The arithmetic mean.
"The average of 10, 20 and 24 is (10 + 20 + 24)/3 = 18." - Any measure of central tendency, especially any mean, the median, or the mode (see Usage notes below).
- An indication of a player's ability calculated from his scoring record, etc.
"batting average"
Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →
average used as an adjective:
- Constituting or relating to the average.
"The average age of the participants was 18.5." - Neither very good nor very bad; rated somewhere in the middle of all others in the same category.
"I soon found I was only an average chess player." - Typical.
"The average family will not need the more expensive features of this product." - Bad or undesirable.
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 →
average used as a verb:
- To compute the arithmetic mean of.
"If you average 10, 20 and 24, you get 18." - Over a period of time or across members of a population, to have or generate a mean value of.
"The daily high temperature last month averaged 15C."
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is average?
- Noun usage: The average of 10, 20 and 24 is (10 + 20 + 24)/3 = 18.
- Noun usage: batting average
- Adjective usage: The average age of the participants was 18.5.
- Adjective usage: I soon found I was only an average chess player.
- Adjective usage: The average family will not need the more expensive features of this product.
- Verb usage: If you average 10, 20 and 24, you get 18.
- Verb usage: The daily high temperature last month averaged 15C.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of average 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 average, 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).