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Early can be an adjective or an adverb.

early used as an adjective:

  1. At a time in advance of the usual or expected event.
    "At eleven, we went for an early lunch."
  2. Arriving a time before expected; sooner than on-time.
    "You're early today! I don't usually see you before nine o'clock."
  3. Near the start or beginning.
    "The play "Two Gentlemen of Verona" is one of Shakespeare's early works."

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 →

early used as an adverb:

  1. At a time before expected; sooner than usual.
    "We finished the project an hour sooner than scheduled, so we left early."

An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →

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What type of word is early?

As detailed above, 'early' can be an adjective or an adverb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adjective usage: At eleven, we went for an early lunch.
  2. Adjective usage: She began reading at an early age.
  3. Adjective usage: His mother suffered an early death.
  4. Adjective usage: You're early today! I don't usually see you before nine o'clock.
  5. Adjective usage: The early guests sipped their punch and avoided each other's eyes.
  6. Adjective usage: The play "Two Gentlemen of Verona" is one of Shakespeare's early works.
  7. Adjective usage: Early results showed their winning 245 out of 300 seats in parliament. The main opponent locked up only 31 seats.
  8. Adverb usage: We finished the project an hour sooner than scheduled, so we left early.

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

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