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column is a noun:

  1. A solid upright structure designed usually to support a larger structure above it, such as a roof or horizontal beam, but sometimes for decoration.
  2. A vertical line of entries in a table, usually read from top to bottom: as opposed to a row (which is horizontal).
  3. A body of troops or army vehicles, usually strung out along a road.
  4. A body of text meant to be read line by line, especially in printed material that has multiple adjacent such on a single page.
    "It was too hard to read the text across the whole page, so I split it into two columns."
  5. The same, as a unit of width in a periodical, especially for advertisements.
    "Each column inch costs $300 a week; this ad is four columns by three inches, so will run $3600 a week."
  6. A recurring feature in a periodical, especially an opinion piece, especially by a single author or small rotating group of authors, or on a single theme.
    "His initial foray into print media was as the author of a weekly column in his elementary-school newspaper."
  7. Something having similar vertical form or structure to the things mentioned above, such as a spinal column.

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 column?

As detailed above, 'column' is a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: It was too hard to read the text across the whole page, so I split it into two columns.
  2. Noun usage: Each column inch costs $300 a week; this ad is four columns by three inches, so will run $3600 a week.
  3. Noun usage: His initial foray into print media was as the author of a weekly column in his elementary-school newspaper.

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