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But can be a preposition, an adverb, a noun or a conjunction.

but used as a preposition:

  1. Outside of.
    "Away but the hoose and tell me whae's there."
  2. Without, apart from.

Prepositions are used to show the relationship between a noun or pronoun and another word. Examples of prepositions are: in, during, beside, after, for. In the sentence "Sows suffer in factory farms." The preposition "in" tells us the position of the sow relative to the factory farm. Learn more →

but used as an adverb:

  1. Merely, only.
    "Since that day, my mood has changed but a little."

An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →

but used as a noun:

  1. An instance or example of using the word "but"
    "It has to be done – no ifs or buts."
  2. The outer room of a small two-room cottage.

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 →

but used as a conjunction:

  1. Except (for), excluding.
    "I like everything but that. I have no choice but to leave."
  2. On the contrary, but rather (introducing a word or clause that contrasts with or contradicts the preceding clause or sentence without the not).
    "I am not rich but poor."
  3. However, although, nevertheless (implies that the following clause is contrary to prior belief or contrasts with or contradicts the preceding clause or sentence).
    "She is very old but still attractive. You told me I could do that but she said that I could not."
  4. Without it also happening that; unless that (introducing a necessary concomitant).
    "It never rains but it pours."

Conjunctions are connector words. Examples of conjunctions are: and, but, so. They help us to group words and connect phrases, like in the sentence: "We have apples and oranges, but we need bananas." Learn more →

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What type of word is but?

As detailed above, 'but' can be a preposition, an adverb, a noun or a conjunction. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Preposition usage: Away but the hoose and tell me whae's there.
  2. Adverb usage: Since that day, my mood has changed but a little.
  3. Noun usage: It has to be done – no ifs or buts.
  4. Conjunction usage: I like everything but that. I have no choice but to leave.
  5. Conjunction usage: I am not rich but poor.
  6. Conjunction usage: She is very old but still attractive. You told me I could do that but she said that I could not.
  7. Conjunction usage: It never rains but it pours.

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