Word Type
Cup can be a verb or a noun.
cup used as a verb:
- To form into the shape of a cup, particularly of the hands
"Cup your hands and I'll pour some rice into them." - To hold something in cupped hands
"He cupped the ball carefully in his hands."
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 →
cup used as a noun:
- A concave vessel for drinking from, usually made of opaque material (as opposed to a glass).
"Pour the tea into the cup." - A US unit of liquid measure equal to 8 fluid ounces, 1/16 of a US gallon, or 236.5882365 ml.
- A trophy in the shape of an oversized cup.
"The World Cup is awarded to the winner of a quadrennial football tournament." - A contest for which a cup is awarded.
"The World Cup is the world's most widely watched sporting event." - A cup-shaped object placed in the target hole.
"The ball just misses the cup." - A rigid concave protective covering for the male genitalia. (for UK usage see box)
"Players of contact sports are advised to wear a cup." - One of the two parts of a brassiere which each cover a breast, used as a measurement of size.
"The cups are made of a particularly uncomfortable material." - The symbol \cup denoting union and similar operations (confer cap.)
- A suit of the minor arcana in tarot, or one of the cards from the suit.
- (ultimate frisbee) A defensive style characterized by a three player near defense cupping the thrower; or those three players.
- A flexible concave membrane used to temporarily attach a handle or hook to a flat surface by means of suction (suction cup.)
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is cup?
- Verb usage: Cup your hands and I'll pour some rice into them.
- Verb usage: He cupped the ball carefully in his hands.
- Noun usage: Pour the tea into the cup.
- Noun usage: The World Cup is awarded to the winner of a quadrennial football tournament.
- Noun usage: The World Cup is the world's most widely watched sporting event.
- Noun usage: The ball just misses the cup.
- Noun usage: Players of contact sports are advised to wear a cup.
- Noun usage: The cups are made of a particularly uncomfortable material.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of cup 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 cup, 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).