Word Type
Bug can be a verb or a noun.
bug used as a verb:
- To annoy.
"Don’t bug me, I’m busy!" - To install an electronic listening device or devices in.
"We need to know what’s going on. We’ll bug his house."
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 →
bug used as a noun:
- An insect of the order Hemiptera (the "true bugs").
- A colloquial name for any insect or arachnid that is a pest.
"These flies are a bother. I’ll get some bug spray and kill them." - Various species of marine crustaceans; e.g. a Morton Bay bug.
- A problem that needs fixing, especially in computing.
"The software bug led the computer to calculate 2 plus 2 as 5." - A contagious illness; a bacterium or virus causing it
"He’s got the flu bug." - An enthusiasm for something; an obsession
"I think he’s a gold bug, he has over 10,000 ounces in storage." - An electronic intercept device
"We installed a bug in her telephone" - A small and and usually invisible file (traditionally a single pixel image) on a World Wide Web page, primarily used to track users.
"He suspected the image was a web bug used for determining who was visiting the site." - A small, usually transparent or translucent image placed in a corner of a television program to indicate what network or cable channel is televising it
"Channel 4's bug distracted Jim from his favorite show" - A manually positioned marker in flight instruments
- A semi-automated telegraph key
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is bug?
- Verb usage: Don’t bug me, I’m busy!
- Verb usage: We need to know what’s going on. We’ll bug his house.
- Noun usage: These flies are a bother. I’ll get some bug spray and kill them.
- Noun usage: The software bug led the computer to calculate 2 plus 2 as 5.
- Noun usage: He’s got the flu bug.
- Noun usage: I think he’s a gold bug, he has over 10,000 ounces in storage.
- Noun usage: to catch the skiing bug
- Noun usage: We installed a bug in her telephone
- Noun usage: He suspected the image was a web bug used for determining who was visiting the site.
- Noun usage: Channel 4's bug distracted Jim from his favorite show
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of bug 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 bug, 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).
