Word Type
Clap can be a noun or a verb.
clap used as a noun:
- The act of striking the palms of the hands, or any two surfaces, together.
"He summoned the waiter with a clap." - Any loud, sudden, explosive sound made by striking hard surfaces together, or resembling such a sound.
"She shut her diary with a loud clap." - A slap with the hand, usually in a jovial manner.
"His father's affection never went further than a handshake or a clap on the shoulder." - (always as “the clap”) Gonorrhea.
"He wasn't careful; he caught both syphilis and the clap." - (Yorkshire dialect) A dropping of cow dung (presumably from the sound made as it hits the ground)
"“Oh ! get some coo clap (cow dung), mix it wi’ fish oil (whale oil), put it on, and let it stop on all neet.”"
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 →
clap used as a verb:
- To strike the palms of the hands together, creating a sharp sound.
"The children began to clap in time with the music." - To applaud.
"The audience loudly clapped the actress, who responded with a deep curtsey." - To slap with the hand in a jovial manner.
"He would often clap his teammates on the back for encouragement." - To bring two surfaces together forcefully, creating a sharp sound.
"He clapped the empty glass down on the table." - To create or assemble (something) hastily (usually followed by up or together).
"We should clap together a shelter before nightfall." - To set or put, usually in haste.
"The sheriff clapped him in jail."
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 →
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What type of word is clap?
- Noun usage: He summoned the waiter with a clap.
- Noun usage: She shut her diary with a loud clap.
- Noun usage: Off in the distance, he heard the clap of thunder.
- Noun usage: His father's affection never went further than a handshake or a clap on the shoulder.
- Noun usage: He wasn't careful; he caught both syphilis and the clap.
- Noun usage: “Oh ! get some coo clap (cow dung), mix it wi’ fish oil (whale oil), put it on, and let it stop on all neet.”
- Verb usage: The children began to clap in time with the music.
- Verb usage: The audience loudly clapped the actress, who responded with a deep curtsey.
- Verb usage: It isn’t the singers they are clapping, it's the composer.
- Verb usage: He would often clap his teammates on the back for encouragement.
- Verb usage: He clapped the empty glass down on the table.
- Verb usage: She clapped the book shut.
- Verb usage: He clapped across the floor in his boots.
- Verb usage: We should clap together a shelter before nightfall.
- Verb usage: The rival factions clapped up a truce.
- Verb usage: The sheriff clapped him in jail.
- Verb usage: She was the prettiest thing I'd ever clapped eyes on, she was.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of clap 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 clap, 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).
