Word Type
Fair can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.
fair used as an adjective:
- Beautiful, of a pleasing appearance, with a pure and fresh quality.
"Monday's child is fair of face." - Unblemished and innocent; clean and pure.
"one's fair name" - Light in color, pale, particularly as regards skin tone but also refers to blond hair.
"She had fair hair and blue eyes." - Just, equitable.
"He must be given a fair trial." - Adequate, reasonable, or decent.
"The patient was in a fair condition after some treatment." - Between the baselines.
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 →
fair used as a noun:
- Something which is fair (in various senses of the adjective).
"When will we learn to distinguish between the fair and the foul?" - A woman, a member of the ‘fair sex'; also as a collective singular, women.
- A community gathering to celebrate and exhibit local achievements.
- An event for public entertainment and trade, a market.
- An event for professionals in a trade to learn of new products and do business.
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 →
fair used as a verb:
- to construct or design a structure whose primary function is to produce a smooth outline and reduce air drag.
- To smoothen or even a surface (especially a connection or junction on a surface).
- To bring into perfect alignment (especially about rivet holes when connecting structural members).
- To make fair.
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 fair?
- Adjective usage: Monday's child is fair of face.
- Adjective usage: one's fair name
- Adjective usage: She had fair hair and blue eyes.
- Adjective usage: He must be given a fair trial.
- Adjective usage: The patient was in a fair condition after some treatment.
- Noun usage: When will we learn to distinguish between the fair and the foul?
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of fair 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 fair, 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).