Word Type
Color can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.
color used as a noun:
- The spectral composition of visible light.
"Humans and birds can perceive color." - A particular set of visible spectral compositions, perceived or named as a class; blee.
"Most languages have names for the colors black, white, red, and green." - Hue as opposed to achromatic colors (black, white and greys).
"He referred to the white flag as one "drained of all color"." - Human skin tone, especially as an indicator of race or ethnicity.
"Color has been a sensitive issue in many societies." - interest, especially in a selective area.
"a bit of local color." - In corporate finance, details on sales, profit margins, or other financial figures, especially while reviewing quarterly results when an officer of a company is speaking to investment analysts.
"Could you give me some color with regards to which products made up the mix of revenue for this quarter?" - A property of quarks, with three values called red, green, and blue, which they can exchange by passing gluons.
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 →
color used as an adjective:
- Conveying color, as opposed to shades of gray.
"Color television and movies were considered a great improvement over black and white."
Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →
color used as a verb:
- To give something color.
"We could color the walls red." - To draw within the boundaries of a line drawing using colored markers or crayons.
"My kindergartener loves to color." - To become red through increased blood flow.
- To affect without completely changing.
"That interpretation certainly colors my perception of the book." - To attribute a quality to.
"(colloquial) Color me confused."
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is color?
- Noun usage: Humans and birds can perceive color.
- Noun usage: Most languages have names for the colors black, white, red, and green.
- Noun usage: He referred to the white flag as one "drained of all color".
- Noun usage: Color has been a sensitive issue in many societies.
- Noun usage: a bit of local color.
- Noun usage: Could you give me some color with regards to which products made up the mix of revenue for this quarter?
- Adjective usage: Color television and movies were considered a great improvement over black and white.
- Verb usage: We could color the walls red.
- Verb usage: My kindergartener loves to color.
- Verb usage: That interpretation certainly colors my perception of the book.
- Verb usage: (colloquial) Color me confused.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of color 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 color, 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).
