Word Type
Burn can be a noun or a verb.
burn used as a noun:
- A physical injury caused by heat or cold or electricity or radiation or caustic chemicals.
"She had second-degree burns from falling in the bonfire." - The act of burning something.
"They’re doing a controlled burn of the fields." - Physical sensation in the muscles following strenuous exercise, caused by build-up of lactic acid.
"One and, two and, keep moving; feel the burn!" - An intense non-physical sting, as left by an effective insult.
- A stream.
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 →
burn used as a verb:
- To be consumed by fire, or at least in flames.
"He watched the house burn." - To become overheated so as to make unusable.
"The grill was too hot and the steak was burned." - To feel hot, e.g. due to embarrassment.
"Her cheeks burned with shame." - To sunburn.
"She forgot to put on sunscreen and burned." - To accidentally touch a moving stone.
- To cause to be consumed by fire.
"He burned his manuscript in the fireplace." - To overheat so as to make unusable.
"He burned the toast." - To injure (a person or animal) with heat or caustic chemicals.
"She burned the child with an iron, and was put in jail for ten years." - To betray.
"The informant burned him." - To write data to a permanent storage medium like a compact disc or a ROM chip.
"We’ll burn this program onto an E-PROM one hour before the demo begins." - To waste (time).
"We have an hour to burn." - To insult or defeat.
"I just burned you again." - In pontoon, to swap a pair of cards for another pair. Also to deal a dead card.
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 burn?
- Noun usage: She had second-degree burns from falling in the bonfire.
- Noun usage: They’re doing a controlled burn of the fields.
- Noun usage: One and, two and, keep moving; feel the burn!
- Verb usage: He watched the house burn.
- Verb usage: The grill was too hot and the steak was burned.
- Verb usage: Her cheeks burned with shame.
- Verb usage: She forgot to put on sunscreen and burned.
- Verb usage: He burned his manuscript in the fireplace.
- Verb usage: He burned the toast.
- Verb usage: She burned the child with an iron, and was put in jail for ten years.
- Verb usage: The informant burned him.
- Verb usage: We’ll burn this program onto an E-PROM one hour before the demo begins.
- Verb usage: We have an hour to burn.
- Verb usage: I just burned you again.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of burn 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 burn, 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).
