Word Type
Fire can be a verb or a noun.
fire used as a verb:
- To set (something) on fire.
- To heat without setting on fire, as ceramic, metal objects, etc.
"If you fire the pottery at too high a temperature, it may crack." - To drive away by setting a fire.
- To terminate the employment contract of an employee, usually because of the misconduct or poor performance of the employee (as opposed to "make redundant" or "lay off", where the employee's actions are not the reason for the termination); to expel one from their job.
"She should fire the employee that stole from the company." - To shoot (a device that launches a projectile or a pulse of stream of something).
"We will fire our guns at the enemy." - To shoot a gun, a cannon or a similar weapon.
"Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes." - To cause an action potential in a cell.
"When a neuron fires, it transmits information." - To forcibly direct.
"He answered the questions the reporters fired at him."
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 →
fire used as a noun:
- A (usually self-sustaining) chemical reaction involving the bonding of oxygen with carbon or other fuel, with the production of heat and the presence of flame or smouldering.
- Something that has produced or is capable of producing this chemical reaction, such as a campfire.
"We sat around the fire singing songs and telling stories." - The, often accidental, occurrence of fire in a certain place leading to its full or partial destruction.
"There was a fire at the school last night and the whole place burned down." - One of the four basic elements.
- One of the five basic elements (see Wikipedia article on the Classical elements).
- A heater or stove used in place of a real fire (such as an electric fire).
- The elements necessary to start a fire.
"The fire was laid and needed to be lit." - The in-flight bullets or other projectiles shot from a gun.
"The fire from the enemy guns kept us from attacking."
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is fire?
- Verb usage: If you fire the pottery at too high a temperature, it may crack.
- Verb usage: They fire the wood to make it easier to put a point on the end.
- Verb usage: She should fire the employee that stole from the company.
- Verb usage: We will fire our guns at the enemy.
- Verb usage: His fired his radar gun at passing cars.
- Verb usage: Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes.
- Verb usage: When a neuron fires, it transmits information.
- Verb usage: He answered the questions the reporters fired at him.
- Verb usage: His nail gun fired about twenty roofing nails a minute.
- Noun usage: We sat around the fire singing songs and telling stories.
- Noun usage: There was a fire at the school last night and the whole place burned down.
- Noun usage: During hot and dry summers many fires in forests are caused by regardlessly discarded cigarette butts.
- Noun usage: The fire was laid and needed to be lit.
- Noun usage: The fire from the enemy guns kept us from attacking.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of fire 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 fire, 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).
