Word Type
Drill can be a noun or a verb.
drill used as a noun:
- A tool used to remove material so as to create a hole, typically by plunging a rotating cutting bit into a stationary workpiece.
"Wear safety glasses when operating an electric drill." - The portion of a drilling tool that drives the bit
"Use a drill with a wire brush to remove any rust or buildup." - An activity done as an exercise or practice (especially a military exercise)
"Regular fire drills can ensure that everyone knows how to exit safely in an emergency." - An Old World monkey of West Africa, Mandrillus leucophaeus, similar in appearance to the mandrill, but lacking the colorful face.
- A strong, durable cotton fabric with a strong bias (diagonal) in the weave.
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 →
drill used as a verb:
- To create a hole by removing material with a drill (1)
"Drill a small hole to start the screw in the right direction." - To practice, especially in a military context
"They drilled daily to learn the routine exactly." - To repeat an idea frequently in order to encourage someone to remember it
"The instructor drilled into us the importance of reading the instructions." - To investigate or examine something in more detail or at a different level
"Drill deeper and you may find the underlying assumptions faulty." - To cause one's subordinates to drill (2)
"The sergeant was up by 6:00 every morning, drilling his troops."
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 drill?
- Noun usage: Wear safety glasses when operating an electric drill.
- Noun usage: Use a drill with a wire brush to remove any rust or buildup.
- Noun usage: Regular fire drills can ensure that everyone knows how to exit safely in an emergency.
- Verb usage: Drill a small hole to start the screw in the right direction.
- Verb usage: They drilled daily to learn the routine exactly.
- Verb usage: The instructor drilled into us the importance of reading the instructions.
- Verb usage: Drill deeper and you may find the underlying assumptions faulty.
- Verb usage: The sergeant was up by 6:00 every morning, drilling his troops.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of drill 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 drill, 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).
