Word Type
element is a noun:
- One of the simplest or essential parts or principles of which anything consists, or upon which the constitution or fundamental powers of anything are based.
- Any one of the simplest chemical substances that cannot be decomposed in a chemical reaction or by any chemical means and made up of atoms all having the same number of protons.
- One of the four basic building blocks of matter in theories of ancient philosophers and alchemists: water, earth, fire, and air
- Something small.
"an element of doubt" - Atmospheric forces such as strong winds and rains.
- A place or state of being that an individual or object is better suited towards.
"be in one's own element" - A required aspect or component of a cause of action. A deed is regarded a violation of law only if each element can be proved.
- One of the objects in a set.
- A group of people within a larger group having a particular common characteristic.
"You sometimes find the hooligan element at football matches." - A short form of heating element, a component in electrical equipment, often in the form of a coil, having a high resistance, thereby generating heat when a current is passed through it.
"The element in this electric kettle can heat the water in under a minute." - One of the conceptual objects in a markup language, usually represented in text by a matching pair of tags.
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 →
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What type of word is element?
- Noun usage: an element of doubt
- Noun usage: be in one's own element
- Noun usage: You sometimes find the hooligan element at football matches.
- Noun usage: The element in this electric kettle can heat the water in under a minute.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of element 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 element, 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).
