Word Type
Cane can be a noun or a verb.
cane used as a noun:
- The slender, flexible main stem of a plant such as bamboo, including many species in the Grass family Gramineae.
- The plant itself, including many species in the Grass family Gramineae; a reed.
- sugar cane. Sometimes applied to maize or rarely to sorghum when such plants are processed to make molasses (treacle) or sugar.
- A short rod or stick, traditionally of wood or bamboo, used for corporal punishment.
- A length of colored and/or patterned glass rod, used in the specific glassblowing technique called caneworking.
- Corporal punishment by beating with a cane; the cane.
"The teacher gave his student the cane for throwing paper." - A strong short staff used for support during walking; a walking stick.
"After breaking his leg, he needed a cane to walk." - A long rod often collapsible and commonly white (for visibility to other persons), used by blind persons for guidance in determining their course and for probing for obstacles in their path.
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 →
cane used as a verb:
- To strike or beat, notably with a cane or similar implement; to destroy.
- To do something well, in a competent fashion.
- It hurts.
"Don't hit me with that, it really canes!"
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 cane?
- Noun usage: The teacher gave his student the cane for throwing paper.
- Noun usage: After breaking his leg, he needed a cane to walk.
- Verb usage: Don't hit me with that, it really canes!
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of cane 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 cane, 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).
