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Bit can be an adverb, a verb or a noun.

bit used as an adverb:

  1. To a small extent; in a small amount (usually with "a").
    "That's a bit too sweet."

An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →

bit used as a verb:


  1. "Your dog bit me!"

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 →

bit used as a noun:

  1. A piece of metal placed in a horse's mouth and connected to reins to direct the animal.
  2. A rotary cutting tool fitted to a drill, used to make holes.
  3. An eighth of a dollar. Note that there is no coin minted worth 12.5 cents.
    "A quarter is two bits."
  4. A coin of a specified value.
    "A threepenny bit."
  5. A small amount of something.
    "There were bits of paper all over the floor."
  6. Specifically, a small amount of time.
    "I'll be there in a bit, I need to take care of something first."
  7. A portion of something.
    "I'd like a big bit of cake, please."
  8. A prison sentence.
  9. An excerpt of material from a stand-up comedian's repertoire.
    "His bit about video games was not nearly as entertaining as the other segments of his show."
  10. A binary digit, generally represented as a 1 or 0.
  11. The smallest unit of storage in a digital computer, consisting of a binary digit.
  12. Any datum that may take on one of exactly two values.

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 bit?

As detailed above, 'bit' can be an adverb, a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adverb usage: That's a bit too sweet.
  2. Verb usage: Your dog bit me!
  3. Noun usage: A quarter is two bits.
  4. Noun usage: A threepenny bit.
  5. Noun usage: There were bits of paper all over the floor.
  6. Noun usage: Does your leg still hurt? / Just a bit now.
  7. Noun usage: I'll be there in a bit, I need to take care of something first.
  8. Noun usage: He was here just a bit ago, but it looks like he's stepped out.
  9. Noun usage: I'd like a big bit of cake, please.
  10. Noun usage: His bit about video games was not nearly as entertaining as the other segments of his show.

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of bit 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 bit, 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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