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Damp can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.

damp used as a noun:

  1. Moisture; humidity; dampness.
  2. Fog; fogginess; vapor.
    "Night . . . with black air Accompanied, with damps and dreadful gloom. - John Milton"
  3. Dejection or depression.
    "Even now, while thus I stand blest in thy presence, A secret damp of grief comes o'er my soul. - Joseph Addison"
  4. A gaseous product, formed in coal mines, old wells, pits, etc.

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 →

damp used as an adjective:

  1. Being in a state between dry and wet; moderately wet; moist.
    "O'erspread with a damp sweat and holy fear - John Dryden"
  2. Pertaining to or affected by noxious vapours; dejected, stupified.
    "1667, All these and more came flocking; but with looks / Down cast and damp - John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, ll. 522-3"

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 →

damp used as a verb:

  1. To dampen; to render damp; to moisten; to make humid, or moderately wet; as, to damp cloth.
  2. To put out, as fire; to depress or deject; to deaden; to cloud; to check or restrain, as action or vigor; to make dull; to weaken; to discourage.
  3. To suppress vibrations (mechanical) or oscillations (electrical) by converting energy to heat (or some other form of energy).
    "To damp your tender hopes - Mark Akenside"

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 →

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What type of word is damp?

As detailed above, 'damp' can be a noun, an adjective or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: Night . . . with black air Accompanied, with damps and dreadful gloom. - John Milton
  2. Noun usage: Even now, while thus I stand blest in thy presence, A secret damp of grief comes o'er my soul. - Joseph Addison
  3. Noun usage: It must have thrown a damp over your autumn excursion. - James David Forbes
  4. Adjective usage: O'erspread with a damp sweat and holy fear - John Dryden
  5. Adjective usage: 1667, All these and more came flocking; but with looks / Down cast and damp - John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, ll. 522-3
  6. Verb usage: To damp your tender hopes - Mark Akenside
  7. Verb usage: Usury dulls and damps all industries, improvements, and new inventions, wherein money would be stirring if it were not for this slug - Francis Bacon
  8. Verb usage: How many a day has been damped and darkened by an angry word! - Sir John Lubbock
  9. Verb usage: The failure of his enterprise damped the spirit of the soldiers. - Thomas Babington Macaulay
  10. Verb usage: Hollow rollers damp vibration. - [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3238/is_200004/ai_n7935204]

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