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excess is a noun:

  1. The degree or amount by which one thing or number exceeds another; remainder; as, the difference between two numbers is the excess of one over the other.
  2. The state of surpassing or going beyond limits; the being of a measure beyond sufficiency, necessity, or duty; that which exceeds what is usual or proper; immoderateness; superfluity; superabundance; extravagance; as, an excess of provisions or of light.
    "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, ... Is wasteful and ridiculous excess. - Shakespeare"
  3. An undue indulgence of the appetite; transgression of proper moderation in natural gratifications; intemperance; dissipation.
    "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess. Ephesians v. 18"
  4. Spherical excess, the amount by which the sum of the three angles of a spherical triangle exceeds two right angles. The spherical excess is proportional to the area of the triangle.
  5. A condition on an insurance policy by which the insured pays for the first part of any claim, in exchange for a lower premium.

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 excess?

As detailed above, 'excess' is a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, ... Is wasteful and ridiculous excess. - Shakespeare
  2. Noun usage: That kills me with excess of grief, this with excess of joy. - Walsh
  3. Noun usage: Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess. Ephesians v. 18
  4. Noun usage: Thy desire ... leads to no excess That reaches blame. - Milton

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of excess 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 excess, and guess at its most common usage.

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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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