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Crank can be a verb or a noun.

crank used as a verb:

  1. To turn a crank.
    "Crank it up!"
  2. To cause to spin via other means, as though turned by a crank.
    "I turn the key and crank the engine; yet it doesn't turn over"
  3. To act in a cranky manner; to behave unreasonably and irritably.
    "Quit cranking about your spilt milk!"
  4. To produce or present a desired object.
    "Crank out the beer!"
  5. To run with a winding course; to double; to crook; to wind and turn.
    "See how this river comes me cranking in. - Shakespeare"

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 →

crank used as a noun:

  1. A bent piece of an axle, or shaft, or an arm attached at right angles to the end of a shaft or wheel, used to impart a circular action to a wheel or other mechanical device and create power; also used to change circular into reciprocating motion, or reciprocating into circular motion.
    "Use the crank on the motorcycle and go for a ride."
  2. The act of converting power into motion, by turning a crankshaft.
    "Yes, a crank was all it needed to start."
  3. Any bend, turn, or winding, as of a passage.
    "So many turning cranks these have, so many crooks. - Spenser."
  4. An ill-tempered or nasty person
    "Billy-Bob is a nasty, old crank! He chased my cat away."
  5. methamphetamine.
    "Danny got abscesses from shooting all that bathtub crank."
  6. A person who is considered strange to others. They may do strange things, or be a crank by nature.
    "John is a crank because he talks to himself."
  7. A twist or turn in speech; a conceit consisting in a change of the form or meaning of a word.
    "Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles. - Milton."
  8. A ship which, because of insufficient or poorly stowed ballast or cargo, is in danger of overturning

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 crank?

As detailed above, 'crank' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: Crank it up!
  2. Verb usage: He's been cranking all day and yet it refuses to crank.
  3. Verb usage: I turn the key and crank the engine; yet it doesn't turn over
  4. Verb usage: Quit cranking about your spilt milk!
  5. Verb usage: Crank out the beer!
  6. Verb usage: See how this river comes me cranking in. - Shakespeare
  7. Noun usage: Use the crank on the motorcycle and go for a ride.
  8. Noun usage: Yes, a crank was all it needed to start.
  9. Noun usage: So many turning cranks these have, so many crooks. - Spenser.
  10. Noun usage: Billy-Bob is a nasty, old crank! He chased my cat away.
  11. Noun usage: Danny got abscesses from shooting all that bathtub crank.
  12. Noun usage: John is a crank because he talks to himself.
  13. Noun usage: Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles. - Milton.

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