WordType Logo

Word Type

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

degenerate used as an adjective:

  1. (of qualities) having deteriorated, degraded or fallen from normal, coherent, balanced and desirable to an undesirable and typically abnormal
  2. (of a human or system) having lost good or desirable qualities
  3. (of an encoding or function) having multiple domain elements correspond to one element of the range
    "The genetic code is degenerate because a single amino acid can be coded by one of several codons."
  4. a degenerate case is a limiting case in which a class of object changes its nature so as to belong to another, usually simpler, class.

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 →

degenerate used as a noun:

  1. One is degenerate, who has fallen from previous stature.
    "You are a degenerate, boy. You're a disgrace to your ancestors."

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 →

degenerate used as a verb:

  1. (of humans or systems) to lose good or desirable qualities;
    "His condition continued to degenerate even after admission to hospital."

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 degenerate?

As detailed above, 'degenerate' can be an adjective, a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adjective usage: The genetic code is degenerate because a single amino acid can be coded by one of several codons.
  2. Noun usage: You are a degenerate, boy. You're a disgrace to your ancestors.
  3. Verb usage: His condition continued to degenerate even after admission to hospital.

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

Recent Queries