Word Type
Dull can be an adjective or a verb.
dull used as an adjective:
- Lacking the ability to cut easily; not sharp.
"All these knives are dull." - Boring; not exciting or interesting.
"He sat through the dull lecture and barely stayed awake." - Not shiny; having a matte finish or no particular luster.
"Choose a dull finish to hide fingerprints." - Not bright or intelligent; stupid; slow of understanding.
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 →
dull used as a verb:
- To render dull; to remove or blunt an edge or something that was sharp.
"Years of misuse have dulled the tools." - To soften, moderate or blunt.
"He drinks to dull the pain." - To lose a sharp edge; to become dull.
"A razor will dull with use."
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 dull?
- Adjective usage: All these knives are dull.
- Adjective usage: He sat through the dull lecture and barely stayed awake.
- Adjective usage: When does having a dull personality ever get you a girlfriend? Even if you get one, how does being dull help you keep a relationship for over a year?
- Adjective usage: Choose a dull finish to hide fingerprints.
- Verb usage: Years of misuse have dulled the tools.
- Verb usage: He drinks to dull the pain.
- Verb usage: A razor will dull with use.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of dull 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 dull, 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).
