Word Type
Blah can be an adjective, a noun or an interjection.
blah used as an adjective:
- Dull; uninteresting; insipid.
"Well, the new restaurant seems nice, but their menu is a little blah." - Low in spirit or health; down.
"I decided to go exercise rather than sit around all day feeling blah."
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 →
blah used as a noun:
- Nonsense; drivel; idle, meaningless talk.
- (in plural, the blahs) A general or ambiguous feeling of discomfort, dissatisfaction, uneasiness, boredom, mild depression, etc.
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 →
blah used as an interjection:
- An expression of mild frustration.
"Blah! Why can't I get this computer to work!" - (When spoken repeatedly, often three times in succession: blah blah blah!) Imitative of idle, meaningless talk; used sometimes in a slightly derogatory manner to mock or downplay another's words, or to show disinterest in a diatribe, rant, instructions, unsolicited advice, parenting, etc. Also used when recalling and retelling another's words, as a substitute for the portions of the speech deemed irrelevant.
"Yea, yea, blah blah blah, Mom, you said this all yesterday." - Representing the sound of vomiting. See bleah, bleh.
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is blah?
- Adjective usage: Well, the new restaurant seems nice, but their menu is a little blah.
- Adjective usage: I decided to go exercise rather than sit around all day feeling blah.
- Interjection usage: Blah! Why can't I get this computer to work!
- Interjection usage: Yea, yea, blah blah blah, Mom, you said this all yesterday.
- Interjection usage: And then he was like, "Oh, my brother's an Internet millionaire, blah blah blah." Like I care!
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of blah 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 blah, 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).
