Word Type
Detail can be a verb or a noun.
detail used as a verb:
- to explain in detail
"I'll detail the exact procedure to you later." - (US (?)) to clean carefully (particularly a car)
"We need to have the minivan detailed." - to assign to a particular task
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 →
detail used as a noun:
- Something small enough to escape casual notice.
"Note this fine detail in the lower left corner." - A profusion of details.
"This etching is full of fine detail" - Something considered trivial enough to ignore.
"I don't concern myself with the details of accounting" - (plural details) A person's name, address and other personal information.
"The arresting officer asked the suspect for his details." - a temporary unit or assignment.
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 detail?
- Verb usage: I'll detail the exact procedure to you later.
- Verb usage: We need to have the minivan detailed.
- Noun usage: Note this fine detail in the lower left corner.
- Noun usage: We missed several important details in the contract.
- Noun usage: This etching is full of fine detail
- Noun usage: I don't concern myself with the details of accounting
- Noun usage: The arresting officer asked the suspect for his details.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of detail 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 detail, 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).
