Word Type
Crater can be a noun or a verb.
crater used as a noun:
- A hemispherical pit created by the impact of a meteorite or other object.
- The basinlike opening or mouth of a volcano, through which the chief eruption comes; similarly, the mouth of a geyser, about which a cone of silica is often built up.
- The pit left by the explosion of a mine or bomb.
- Any large, roughly circular depression or hole.
- A term of endearment, a dote, a wretched thing.
"1843 - I then had the two best tarriers beneath the canopy; this poor crater is their daughter," and he patted the dog's head affectionately. William Hamilton Maxwell, Wild Sports of the West: With Legendary Tales, and Local Sketches , Publisher R. Bentley, page 77,"
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 →
crater used as a verb:
- To collapse catastrophically; implode; hollow out; to become devastated or completely destroyed.
"The economy is about to crater. -- Attributed by David Letterman to Sen. John McCain. [http://laughlines.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/the-economy-is-exploding/ NYTimes blog]" - To crash or fall.
"He cratered into that snow bank about five seconds after his first lesson."
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 crater?
- Noun usage: 1843 - I then had the two best tarriers beneath the canopy; this poor crater is their daughter," and he patted the dog's head affectionately. William Hamilton Maxwell, Wild Sports of the West: With Legendary Tales, and Local Sketches , Publisher R. Bentley, page 77,
- Noun usage: 1859 - She is a charming crater; I would venture to say that, if I was not her father. The British Drama: A Collection of the Most Esteemed Tragedies, Comedies ...
- Verb usage: The economy is about to crater. -- Attributed by David Letterman to Sen. John McCain. [http://laughlines.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/the-economy-is-exploding/ NYTimes blog]
- Verb usage: He cratered into that snow bank about five seconds after his first lesson.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of crater 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 crater, 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).
