Word Type
Cannonball can be a verb or a noun.
cannonball used as a verb:
- To jump/dive into water doing a cannonball landing.
"He cannonballed into the pool, drenching us all."
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 →
cannonball used as a noun:
- 1. A spherical projectile fired from a smoothbore cannon; a solid shot; a solid round shot; a ball. 2. An explosive-filled hollow iron sphere fused through a hole and intended to explode at a calculated distance rather than explode on impact.
- The result of running and jumping in a flexed position into a swimming pool to create a large splash, mimicking the flight and shape of a cannonball.
"The cannonball could be called the S.U.V. of the pool — oversized, brash, hormonally hardwired." - Something that moves fast.
"Meetings of the model train club always begin with the song "Wabash Cannonball"."
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is cannonball?
- Verb usage: He cannonballed into the pool, drenching us all.
- Noun usage: The cannonball could be called the S.U.V. of the pool — oversized, brash, hormonally hardwired.
- Noun usage: The New Yorker, 30 August 2004, p.40
- Noun usage: I would call it a water-entry stunt, not a dive.
- Noun usage: The New Yorker, 30 August 2004, p.40, quoting "Coach O'Brien"
- Noun usage: Meetings of the model train club always begin with the song "Wabash Cannonball".
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of cannonball 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 cannonball, 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).
