WordType Logo

Word Type

Do can be a noun, an abbreviation or a verb.

do used as a noun:

  1. A function, celebration, party.
    "We’re having a bit of a do on Saturday to celebrate my birthday."
  2. A hairdo.
    "Nice do!"
  3. A period of confusion or argument.
  4. Something that can or should be done (usually in the phrase dos and don'ts).
  5. A syllable used in solfège to represent the first and eighth tonic of a major scale.

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 →

do used as an abbreviation:

  1. ditto

An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. The term "Rd" is a commobly used abbreviation of "Road". Learn more →

do used as a verb:


  1. "Do you go?"

  2. "I do not go."

  3. "But I do go."

  4. "I play tennis; he does too."
  5. To perform; to execute.
    "All you ever do is surf the internet."
  6. To suffice.
    "It’s not the best broom, but it will have to do."
  7. To be reasonable or acceptable.
    "It simply will not do to have dozens of children running around such a quiet event."
  8. To have (as an effect).
    "The fresh air did him some good."
  9. To fare; to succeed or fail.
    "Our relationship isn't doing very well."
  10. To have as one's job.
    "What do you do?"
  11. To cook.
    "I'll just do some eggs."
  12. To travel in, to tour, to make a circuit of.
    "Let’s do New York also."
  13. To treat in a certain way.
  14. To spend (time) in jail.
    "I did five years for armed robbery."
  15. To impersonate or depict.
    "They really laughed when he did Clinton, with a perfect accent and a leer."
  16. To kill.
  17. To have sex with. (See also do it)
  18. To cheat or swindle.
    "That guy just did me out of two hundred bucks!"
  19. To convert into a certain form; especially, to translate.
    "The novel has just been done into English."
  20. To finish.
    "Aren't you done yet?"

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 do?

As detailed above, 'do' can be a noun, an abbreviation or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: We’re having a bit of a do on Saturday to celebrate my birthday.
  2. Noun usage: Nice do!
  3. Verb usage: Do you go?
  4. Verb usage: I do not go.
  5. Verb usage: But I do go.
  6. Verb usage: I play tennis; he does too.
  7. Verb usage: All you ever do is surf the internet.
  8. Verb usage: It’s not the best broom, but it will have to do.
  9. Verb usage: This will do me, thanks.
  10. Verb usage: It simply will not do to have dozens of children running around such a quiet event.
  11. Verb usage: The fresh air did him some good.
  12. Verb usage: Our relationship isn't doing very well.
  13. Verb usage: How do you do?
  14. Verb usage: What do you do?
  15. Verb usage: I'll just do some eggs.
  16. Verb usage: Let’s do New York also.
  17. Verb usage: I did five years for armed robbery.
  18. Verb usage: They really laughed when he did Clinton, with a perfect accent and a leer.
  19. Verb usage: That guy just did me out of two hundred bucks!
  20. Verb usage: The novel has just been done into English.
  21. Verb usage: I'm going to do do this play into a movie.
  22. Verb usage: Aren't you done yet?

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