Word Type
Civilization can be a noun or a proper noun.
civilization used as a noun:
- An organized culture encompassing many communities, often on the scale of a nation or a people; a stage or system of social, political or technical development.
"the Aztec civilization" - Human society, particularly civil society.
"A hermit doesn't much care for civilization." - The act or process of civilizing or becoming civilized.
"The teacher's civilization of the child was no easy task." - The state or quality of being civilized.
"He was a man of great civilization." - The act of rendering a criminal process civil.
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 →
civilization used as a proper noun:
- Collectively, those people of the world considered to have a high standard of behavior and / or a high level of development. Commonly subjectively used by people of one society to exclusively refer to their society, or their elite sub-group, or a few associated societies, implying all others, in time or geography or status, as something less than civilised, as savages or barbarians. cf refinement, elitism, civilised society, the Civilised World
A proper noun is a refers to a single, specific person/thing/entity and is used to refer to that person/entity/thing. Examples are London, Jupiter, Sarah, or Microsoft. Proper nouns are distinguished from common nouns, which are words that refer to a class/category of entities (like 'chair', 'grape', and 'computer'). Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is civilization?
- Noun usage: the Aztec civilization
- Noun usage: Western civilization
- Noun usage: Modern civilization is a product of industrialization and globalization.
- Noun usage: A hermit doesn't much care for civilization.
- Noun usage: I'm glad to be back in civilization after a day with that rowdy family.
- Noun usage: The teacher's civilization of the child was no easy task.
- Noun usage: He was a man of great civilization.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of civilization 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 civilization, 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).
