Word Type
Chain can be a verb or a noun.
chain used as a verb:
- To fasten something with a chain
- To link multiple items together
- To secure someone with fetters
- To obstruct the mouth of a river etc with a chain
- To relate data items with a chain of pointers; to be chained to another data item
- To measure a distance using a 66-foot long chain, as in land surveying
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 →
chain used as a noun:
- A series of interconnected rings or links usually made of metal.
"He wore a gold chain around the neck." - A series of interconnected things.
"This led to an unfortunate chain of events." - A series of stores or businesses with the same brand name.
"That chain of restaurants is expanding into our town." - A number of atoms in a series, which combine to form a molecule.
"When examined, the molecular chain included oxygen and hydrogen." - A series of interconnected links of known length, used as a measuring device.
- A long measuring tape.
- A unit of length equal to 22 yards. The length of a commonly used surveying chain. The length of a cricket pitch. Equal to 17.85 metres. Equal to 4 rods.
- A sequence of linked house purchases, each of which is dependent on the preceding and succeeding purchase (said to be "broken" if a buyer or seller pulls out).
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 chain?
- Noun usage: He wore a gold chain around the neck.
- Noun usage: This led to an unfortunate chain of events.
- Noun usage: That chain of restaurants is expanding into our town.
- Noun usage: When examined, the molecular chain included oxygen and hydrogen.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of chain 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 chain, 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).
