Word Type
Balance can be a verb or a noun.
balance used as a verb:
- to make (items) weigh up.
- (figurative) to make (concepts) agree.
- to hold (an object or objects) precariously.
- to make the credits and debits of (an account) correspond.
- to be in equilibrium.
- to have matching credits and debits.
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 →
balance used as a noun:
- A pair of scales.
- Libra.
- A device used to regulate the speed of a watch, clock etc.
- A weight placed on a scale to provide equilibrium; something of equal importance or value.
"Blair thought he could provide a useful balance to Bush's policies." - Equilibrium; a state in which opposing forces cancel each other out.
- Mental equilibrium; calmness, a state of remaining clear-headed and unperturbed.
- Support for both viewpoints, substances etc or neither; neutrality.
- Apparent harmony in arts, design etc. between differing colours, sounds, etc.
- The overall result of conflicting forces, opinions etc.; the influence which ultimately "weighs" more than others.
"The balance of power finally lay with the Royalist forces." - A list accounting for the debits on one side, and for the credits on the other.
- The result of such a procedure; the difference between credit and debit of an account.
"I just need to nip to a bank and check my balance."
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is balance?
- Noun usage: Blair thought he could provide a useful balance to Bush's policies.
- Noun usage: The balance of power finally lay with the Royalist forces.
- Noun usage: I think the balance of opinion is that we should get out while we're ahead.
- Noun usage: I just need to nip to a bank and check my balance.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of balance 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 balance, 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).
