Word Type
Cast can be a verb or a noun.
cast used as a verb:
- To throw.
- To direct (one's eyes, gaze etc.).
- To throw forward (a fishing line, net etc.) into the sea.
- To add up a column of figures; cross-cast refers to adding up a row of figures.
- To calculate the astrological value of (a horoscope, birth etc.).
- To throw (light etc.) on or upon something, or in a given direction.
- To plan, intend (to do something).
- To remove, take off (clothes).
- To throw down or aside.
- To throw off (the skin) as a process of growth; to shed the hair or fur of the coat.
- To give birth to prematurely; to miscarry.
- To shape (molten metal etc.) by pouring into a mould; to make (an object) in such a way.
- To twist or warp (of fabric, timber etc.).
- To assign a role in a play or performance.
"The director cast the part carefully." - To bring the bows of a sailing ship on to the required tack just as the anchor is weighed by use of the headsail; to bring (a ship) round.
- To deposit (a ballot or voting paper); to formally register (one's vote).
- To change a variable type from, for example, integer to real, or integer to text.
"Casting is generally an indication of bad design." - To heave the lead and line in order to ascertain the depth of water.
- To set (a bone etc.) in a cast.
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 →
cast used as a noun:
- An act of throwing.
- Something which has been thrown, dispersed etc.
- A small mass of earth "thrown off" or excreted by a worm.
"The area near the stream was covered with little bubbly worm casts." - The collective group of actors performing a play or production together. Contrasted with crew.
"He’s in the cast of Oliver." - The casting procedure.
"The men got into position for the cast, two at the ladle, two with long rods, all with heavy clothing." - An object made in a mould.
"The cast would need a great deal of machining to become a recognizable finished part." - A supportive and immobilising device used to help mend broken bones.
"The doctor put a cast on the boy’s broken arm." - The mould used to make cast objects
"A plaster cast was made of his face." - A squint.
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 cast?
- Verb usage: The director cast the part carefully.
- Verb usage: Casting is generally an indication of bad design.
- Noun usage: The area near the stream was covered with little bubbly worm casts.
- Noun usage: He’s in the cast of Oliver.
- Noun usage: The men got into position for the cast, two at the ladle, two with long rods, all with heavy clothing.
- Noun usage: The cast would need a great deal of machining to become a recognizable finished part.
- Noun usage: The doctor put a cast on the boy’s broken arm.
- Noun usage: A plaster cast was made of his face.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of cast 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 cast, 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).
