Word Type
Dual can be an adjective or a noun.
dual used as an adjective:
- Characterized by having two (usually equivalent) components.
- Double.
"dual-headed computer" - Pertaining to grammatical number (as in singular and plural), referring to two of something, such as a pair of shoes, in the context of the singular, plural and in some languages, trial grammatical number. Modern Arabic displays a dual number, as did Homeric Greek.
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 →
dual used as a noun:
- Of an item that is one of a pair, the other item in the pair.
- Of a regular polyhedron with V vertices and F faces, the regular polyhedron having F vertices and V faces.
"The octahedron is the dual of the cube." - dual number The grammatical number of a noun marking two of something (as in singular, dual, plural), sometimes referring to two of anything (a couple of, exactly two of), or a chirality-marked pair (as in left and right, as with gloves or shoes) or in some languages as a discourse marker, "between you and me". A few languages display trial number.
- Of a vector in an inner product space, the linear functional corresponding to taking the inner product with that vector. The set of all duals is a vector space called the dual space.
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 dual?
- Adjective usage: dual-headed computer
- Noun usage: The octahedron is the dual of the cube.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of dual 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 dual, 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).
