Word Type
dragon is a noun:
- A legendary, serpentine or reptilian creature.
- # (Western) A gigantic beast, typically reptilian with leathery bat-like wings, lion-like claws, scaly skin and a serpent-like tail, often a monster with fiery breath.
- #* c.1900 — Edith Nesbit, The Last of the Dragons
- #*: But as every well-brought-up prince was expected to kill a dragon, and rescue a princess, the dragons grew fewer and fewer till it was often quite hard for a princess to find a dragon to be rescued from.
- # (Eastern) A large, snake-like lizard with the eyes of a hare, the horns of a stag and the claws of a tiger, usually benefic
- #* 1913 — Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, ch XIII
- #*: These tapestries were magnificently figured with golden dragons; and as the serpentine bodies gleamed and shimmered in the increasing radiance, each dragon, I thought, intertwined its glittering coils more closely with those of another.
- Certain animal species which resemble a dragon in appearance:
- # A very large snake; a python.
- # A lizard of the genus Draco.
- # The Komodo dragon.
- The constellation Draco.
- An unpleasant woman; a harridan.
"She’s a bit of a dragon." - (absolute use, often capitalized: "the Dragon") The nickname for the Chinese empire and People's Republic of China
"Napoleon already warned for the awakening of the Dragon." - (figuratively) Something very formidable or dangerous.
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 dragon?
- Noun usage: She’s a bit of a dragon.
- Noun usage: Napoleon already warned for the awakening of the Dragon.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of dragon 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 dragon, 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).
