Word Type
Bang can be an interjection, a verb or a noun.
bang used as an interjection:
- a verbal emulation of a sudden percussive sound
"He pointed his finger at her like a gun and said, "Bang!""
An interjection is an abrupt remark like Oh! or Dear me, or Eww. It is usually used to express the strong emotions of the speaker. The sentence 'Congratulations! You won the gold medal!' shows the use of 'congratulations' as an interjection. Learn more →
bang used as a verb:
- To make sudden loud noises, and often repeatedly, especially by exploding or hitting something.
"The fireworks banged away all through the night." - To engage in sexual intercourse.
- To hammer or to hit anything hard.
"Hold the picture while I bang in this nail."
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 →
bang used as a noun:
- A sudden percussive noise.
"When he struck it with a hammer, there was a loud bang." - A strike upon an object causing such a noise.
- An explosion.
- (especially plural) A fringe of hair cut across the forehead. (British: fringe)
"Tiffany has long hair and bangs." - The symbol !, known as an exclamation point.
"An e-mail address with an ! is called a bang path." - A factorial, in mathematics, because the factorial of n is often written as n!
- An act of sexual intercourse.
- plural: Brucellosis, a bacterial disease (a corruption of the alternate name "Bang's disease")
- An offbeat figure typical of reggae songs and played on guitar and piano.
- An explosive product, in mining
"Load the bang into the hole." - An abrupt left turn, in Boston slang; the opposite of this, an abrupt right turn, is a hang
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 →
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What type of word is bang?
- Interjection usage: He pointed his finger at her like a gun and said, "Bang!"
- Verb usage: The fireworks banged away all through the night.
- Verb usage: Hold the picture while I bang in this nail.
- Noun usage: When he struck it with a hammer, there was a loud bang.
- Noun usage: Tiffany has long hair and bangs.
- Noun usage: 1902: She was not much to look at. Her red hair hung in an uncurled bang over her forehead — Barbara Baynton, short story Squeaker's Mate (variously reprinted, including in The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, ed. Carmel Bird, 2000, ISBN 0-670-89233-5)
- Noun usage: An e-mail address with an ! is called a bang path.
- Noun usage: Load the bang into the hole.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of bang 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 bang, 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).
