Word Type
be is a verb:
- To occupy a place.
"The cup is on the table." - To occur, to take place.
"When will the meeting be?" - To exist.
- elliptical form of for "be here", "go to and return from" or similar.
"The postman has been today, but my tickets have still not yet come." - Used to indicate that the subject and object are the same.
"Ignorance is bliss." - Used to indicate that the values on either side of an equation are the same.
"3 times 5 is fifteen." - Used to indicate that the subject plays the role of the predicate nominal.
"François Mitterrand was president of France from 1981 to 1995." - Used to connect a noun to an adjective that describes it.
"The sky is blue." - Used to indicate that the subject has the qualities described by a noun or noun phrase.
"The sky is a deep blue today." - Used to form the passive voice.
"The dog was drowned by the boy." - Used to form the continuous forms of various tenses.
"The woman is walking." - Used to form the perfect aspect with certain intransitive verbs. Often still used for to go
"They are not yet come back. (Macbeth by William Shakespeare) (instead of They have not yet come back.)" - Used to form future tenses, especially the future subjunctive.
"I am to leave tomorrow." - Used to indicate age.
"This building is three hundred years old." - Used to indicate height.
"He was five-eight." - Used to indicate time of day, day of the week, or date.
"It is almost eight." - With since, used to indicate passage of time since the occurrence of an event.
"It has been three years since my grandmother died. (similar to My grandmother died three years ago, but emphasizes the intervening period)" - Used to indicate weather, air quality, or the like.
"It’s hot in Arizona, but it’s not usually humid." - Used to indicate temperature.
"It’s in the eighties outside, and next week it’s expected to be in the nineties! (Fahrenheit degrees)"
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 be?
- Verb usage: The cup is on the table.
- Verb usage: When will the meeting be?
- Verb usage: The postman has been today, but my tickets have still not yet come.
- Verb usage: I have been to Spain many times.
- Verb usage: Ignorance is bliss.
- Verb usage: 3 times 5 is fifteen.
- Verb usage: François Mitterrand was president of France from 1981 to 1995.
- Verb usage: The sky is blue.
- Verb usage: The sky is a deep blue today.
- Verb usage: The dog was drowned by the boy.
- Verb usage: The woman is walking.
- Verb usage: I shall be writing to you soon.
- Verb usage: We liked to chat while we were eating.
- Verb usage: They are not yet come back. (Macbeth by William Shakespeare) (instead of They have not yet come back.)
- Verb usage: He is gone.
- Verb usage: I am to leave tomorrow.
- Verb usage: I would drive you, were I to obtain a car.
- Verb usage: This building is three hundred years old.
- Verb usage: He looks twelve, but is actually thirteen, and will turn fourteen next week.
- Verb usage: He was five-eight.
- Verb usage: It is almost eight.
- Verb usage: Today is the second, so I guess next Tuesday must be the tenth.
- Verb usage: It has been three years since my grandmother died. (similar to My grandmother died three years ago, but emphasizes the intervening period)
- Verb usage: It had been six days since his departure, when I received a letter from him.
- Verb usage: It’s hot in Arizona, but it’s not usually humid.
- Verb usage: Why is it so dark in here?
- Verb usage: It’s in the eighties outside, and next week it’s expected to be in the nineties! (Fahrenheit degrees)
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of be 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 be, 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).