Word Type
By can be an adverb, a noun, an adjective, a preposition or an interjection.
by used as an adverb:
- Along a path which runs by the speaker.
"I watched as it passed by."
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
by used as a noun:
- A pass
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 →
by used as an adjective:
- Out of the way, subsidiary.
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 →
by used as a preposition:
- Near or next to.
"The mailbox is by the bus stop." - At some time before (the given time), or before the end of a given time interval.
"Be back by ten o'clock!" - Through the action or presence of.
"The matter was decided by the chairman." - (Indicates the creator of a work) Existing through the authorship etc of.
"There are many well-known plays by William Shakespeare" - (Indicates the cause of a condition or event) Through the action of, caused by, responsibility for; by dint of.
"1874 Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd, 2005 Barnes & Noble Classics publication of 1912 Wessex edition, p109:" - (Indicates a means) Involving/using the means of.
"I avoided the guards by moving only when they weren't looking." - (Indicates a rule followed) Using the rules or logic of.
"I sorted the items by category." - (Indicates the amount of some progression) With a change of.
"Our stock is up by ten percent." - (In the formulae X by X and by Xs, indicates a steady progression, one X after another.)
"We went through the book page by page." - (Indicates an oath) With the authority of.
"By Jove! I think she's got it!" - Used to separate dimensions when describing the size of something.
"It is easy to invert a 2 by 2 matrix."
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 →
by used as an interjection:
An interjection is an abrupt remark like Oh! or Dear me, or Eww. It is usually used to express the strong emotions of the speaker. The sentence 'Congratulations! You won the gold medal!' shows the use of 'congratulations' as an interjection. Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is by?
- Adverb usage: I watched as it passed by.
- Preposition usage: The mailbox is by the bus stop.
- Preposition usage: Be back by ten o'clock!
- Preposition usage: We will send it by the first week of July.
- Preposition usage: The matter was decided by the chairman.
- Preposition usage: The boat was swamped by the water.
- Preposition usage: He was protected by his body armour.
- Preposition usage: There are many well-known plays by William Shakespeare
- Preposition usage: 1874 Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd, 2005 Barnes & Noble Classics publication of 1912 Wessex edition, p109:
- Preposition usage: In other directions the fields and sky were so much of one colour by the snow that it was difficult in a hasty glance to tell whereabouts the horizon occurred [...]
- Preposition usage: I avoided the guards by moving only when they weren't looking.
- Preposition usage: I sorted the items by category.
- Preposition usage: Our stock is up by ten percent.
- Preposition usage: We went through the book page by page.
- Preposition usage: We crawled forward by inches.
- Preposition usage: By Jove! I think she's got it!
- Preposition usage: By all that is holy, I'll put an end to this.
- Preposition usage: It is easy to invert a 2 by 2 matrix.
- Preposition usage: The room was about 4 foot by 6 foot.
- Preposition usage: We used 10 by 20 by 30 cm bricks to build the wall."
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of by 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 by, 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).
