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Can can be a verb or a noun.

can used as a verb:

  1. To know how to; to be able to.
    "She can speak English, French, and German."
  2. May; to be permitted or enabled to.
    "You can go outside and play when you're finished with your homework."
  3. To know.
  4. To preserve, by heating and sealing in a can or jar.
    "They spent August canning fruit and vegetables."
  5. to discard, scrap or terminate (an idea, project, etc.).
    "He canned the whole project because he thought it would fail."
  6. To shut up.
    "Can your gob."
  7. To fire or dismiss an employee.
    "The boss canned him for speaking out."

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 →

can used as a noun:

  1. A more or less cylindrical vessel for liquids, usually of steel or aluminium.
  2. A container used to carry and dispense water for plants (a watering can).
  3. A tin-plate canister, often cylindrical, for preserved foods such as fruit, meat, or fish.
  4. toilet, bathroom.
  5. buttocks.
  6. headphones

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 →

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What type of word is can?

As detailed above, 'can' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: She can speak English, French, and German.
  2. Verb usage: I can play football.
  3. Verb usage: Can you remember your fifth birthday?
  4. Verb usage: You can go outside and play when you're finished with your homework.
  5. Verb usage: Can I use your pen?
  6. Verb usage: They spent August canning fruit and vegetables.
  7. Verb usage: He canned the whole project because he thought it would fail.
  8. Verb usage: Can your gob.
  9. Verb usage: The boss canned him for speaking out.

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