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Blow can be a noun or a verb.

blow used as a noun:

  1. A strong wind.
    "We're having a bit of a blow this afternoon."
  2. A chance to catch one's breath.
    "The players were able to get a blow during the last timeout."
  3. Cocaine.
  4. The act of striking or hitting.
    "A fabricator is used to direct a sharp blow to the surface of the stone."
  5. An unfortunate occurrence.
    "A further blow to the group came in 1917 when Thomson died while canoeing in Algonquin Park."
  6. A mass or display of flowers; a yield.
  7. A display of anything brilliant or bright.
  8. A bloom, state of flowering.
    "roses in full blow."

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 →

blow used as a verb:

  1. To produce an air current.
  2. To propel by an air current.
    "Blow the dust off that book and open it up."
  3. To be propelled by an air current.
    "The leaves blow through the streets in the fall."
  4. To create or shape by blowing; as in to blow bubbles, to blow glass.
  5. To cause to make sound by blowing, as a musical instrument.
  6. To play a musical instrument, such as a horn or woodwind.
  7. To make a sound as the result of being blown.
    "In the harbor, the ships' horns blew."
  8. To exhale visibly through the spout the seawater which it has taken in while feeding.
    "There's nothing more thrilling to the whale watcher than to see a whale surface and blow."
  9. To explode.
    "Get away from that burning gas tank! It's about to blow!"
  10. To cause to explode, shatter, or be utterly destroyed.
    "The demolition squad neatly blew the old hotel up."
  11. To cause sudden destruction of.
    "He blew the tires and the engine."
  12. To suddenly fail destructively.
    "He tried to sprint, but his ligaments blew and he was barely able to walk to the finish line."
  13. To destroy (an electric component) by passing excessive electric current through it.
    "The TV shorted out and blew its fuse."
  14. To be destroyed by such a current.
    "When I turned the lamp on, its bulb blew."
  15. To be very undesirable (see also suck).
    "This blows!"
  16. To recklessly squander.
    "I managed to blow $1000 at blackjack in under an hour."
  17. To fellate.
    "Who did you have to blow to get those backstage passes?"
  18. To leave.
    "Let's blow this joint."
  19. To blossom; to cause to bloom or blossom.

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 →

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What type of word is blow?

As detailed above, 'blow' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: We're having a bit of a blow this afternoon.
  2. Noun usage: The players were able to get a blow during the last timeout.
  3. Noun usage: A fabricator is used to direct a sharp blow to the surface of the stone.
  4. Noun usage: During an exchange to end round 13, Duran landed a blow to the mid-section.
  5. Noun usage: A further blow to the group came in 1917 when Thomson died while canoeing in Algonquin Park.
  6. Noun usage: roses in full blow.
  7. Verb usage: Blow the dust off that book and open it up.
  8. Verb usage: The leaves blow through the streets in the fall.
  9. Verb usage: In the harbor, the ships' horns blew.
  10. Verb usage: There's nothing more thrilling to the whale watcher than to see a whale surface and blow.
  11. Verb usage: There she blows! (i.e. "I see a whale spouting!")
  12. Verb usage: Get away from that burning gas tank! It's about to blow!
  13. Verb usage: The demolition squad neatly blew the old hotel up.
  14. Verb usage: The aerosol can was blown to bits.
  15. Verb usage: He blew the tires and the engine.
  16. Verb usage: He tried to sprint, but his ligaments blew and he was barely able to walk to the finish line.
  17. Verb usage: The TV shorted out and blew its fuse.
  18. Verb usage: When I turned the lamp on, its bulb blew.
  19. Verb usage: Fuses are designed to blow in the event of a short circuit.
  20. Verb usage: This blows!
  21. Verb usage: I managed to blow $1000 at blackjack in under an hour.
  22. Verb usage: I blew $35 thou on a car.
  23. Verb usage: We blew an opportunity to get benign corporate sponsorship.
  24. Verb usage: Who did you have to blow to get those backstage passes?
  25. Verb usage: Let's blow this joint.

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