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Circle can be a verb or a noun.

circle used as a verb:

  1. To travel around along a curved path.
  2. To surround.
  3. To place or mark a circle around.
    "Circle the jobs that you are interested in applying for."
  4. To travel in circles.
    "Vultures circled overhead."

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 →

circle used as a noun:

  1. A two-dimensional geometric figure, a line, consisting of the set of all those points in a plane that are equally distant from another point.
    "The set of all points (x, y) such that (x-1)^2 + y^2 = r^2 is a circle of radius r around the point (1, 0)."
  2. A two-dimensional geometric figure, a disk, consisting of the set of all those points of a plane at a distance less than or equal to a fixed distance from another point.
  3. Any thin three-dimensional equivalent of the geometric figures.
    "Put on your dunce-cap and sit down on that circle."
  4. A curve that more or less forms part or all of a circle.
    "move in a circle"
  5. Orbit.
  6. A specific group of persons.
    "inner circle"
  7. A line comprising two semicircles of 30 yards radius centred on the wickets joined by straight lines parallel to the pitch used to enforce field restrictions in a one-day match.

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 circle?

As detailed above, 'circle' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: Circle the jobs that you are interested in applying for.
  2. Verb usage: Vultures circled overhead.
  3. Noun usage: The set of all points (x, y) such that (x-1)^2 + y^2 = r^2 is a circle of radius r around the point (1, 0).
  4. Noun usage: Put on your dunce-cap and sit down on that circle.
  5. Noun usage: move in a circle
  6. Noun usage: inner circle
  7. Noun usage: circle of friends

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