Word Type
Boss can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.
boss used as a noun:
- A swelling, lump or protuberance in an animal, person or object.
- A lump-like mass of rock, especially one projecting through a strata of different rock.
- A convex protuberance in hammered work, especially the rounded projection in the centre of a shield.
- A protrusion, frequently a cylinder of material that extends beyond a hole.
- A knob or projection, usually at the intersection of ribs in a vault.
- A hassock or small seat, especially made from a bundle of straw.
- A person who oversees and directs the work of others; a supervisor.
- A person in charge of a business or company.
"Chat turned to whisper when the boss entered the conference room." - A leader, the head of an organized group or team.
"They named him boss because he had good leadership skills." - The head of a political party in a given region or district.
"He is the Republican boss in Kentucky." - A term of address to a man.
"Yes, boss." - A final enemy in a video game or in a level/major area/dungeon that is particularly challenging and usually must be beaten in order to progress in or to complete the game.
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 →
boss used as an adjective:
- Of excellent quality, first-rate.
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 →
boss used as a verb:
- To decorate with bosses; to emboss.
- To exercise authoritative control over; to lord over; to boss around; to tell (someone) what to do, often repeatedly.
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 boss?
- Noun usage: Chat turned to whisper when the boss entered the conference room.
- Noun usage: My boss complains that I'm always late to work.
- Noun usage: They named him boss because he had good leadership skills.
- Noun usage: He is the Republican boss in Kentucky.
- Noun usage: Yes, boss.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of boss 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 boss, 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).
