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Damper can be an adjective or a noun.

damper used as an adjective:

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 →

damper used as a noun:

  1. That which damps or checks; as:
    "(a) A valve or movable plate in the flue or other part of a stove, furnace, etc., used to check or regulate the draught of air."
  2. Bread made from a basic recipe of flour, water, milk, and salt: but without yeast.
    "1827: The farm-men usually bake their flour into flat cakes, which they call dampers, and cook these in the ashes. — Peter Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, ii.190. Quoted in G. A. Wilkes, A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms, 1978, ISBN 0-424-00034-2."

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 damper?

As detailed above, 'damper' can be an adjective or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: (a) A valve or movable plate in the flue or other part of a stove, furnace, etc., used to check or regulate the draught of air.
  2. Noun usage: (b) A contrivance (sordine), as in a pianoforte, to deaden vibrations; or, as in other pieces of mechanism, to check some action at a particular time.
  3. Noun usage: (c) Something that kills the mood
  4. Noun usage: (d) A device that decreases the oscillations of a system.
  5. Noun usage: 1827: The farm-men usually bake their flour into flat cakes, which they call dampers, and cook these in the ashes. — Peter Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, ii.190. Quoted in G. A. Wilkes, A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms, 1978, ISBN 0-424-00034-2.

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of damper 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 damper, and guess at its most common usage.

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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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