Word Type
Flash can be a verb, a noun or an adjective.
flash used as a verb:
- To briefly illuminate a scene.
"He flashed the light at the water, trying to see what made the noise." - To blink; to shine or illuminate intermittently.
"The light flashed on and off." - To be visible briefly.
"The scenery flashed by quickly." - To make visible briefly.
"A number will be flashed on the screen." - To write to the memory of an updatable component such as a BIOS chip or games cartridge.
- To expose one's naked body in public briefly.
- To release the pressure from a pressurized vessel.
- to perform a flash.
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 →
flash used as a noun:
- A sudden, short, temporary burst of light.
- A language, created by a repressed minority to maintain cultural identity, that cannot be understood by the ruling class; for example, Ebonics.
- A very short amount of time.
- Material left around the edge of a moulded part at the parting line of the mould.
- The strips of bright cloth or buttons worn around the collars of market traders.
- A pattern where each prop is thrown and caught only once.
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 →
flash used as an adjective:
- Expensive looking and attention worthy.
- Having plenty of ready money
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is flash?
- Verb usage: He flashed the light at the water, trying to see what made the noise.
- Verb usage: The light flashed on and off.
- Verb usage: The scenery flashed by quickly.
- Verb usage: A number will be flashed on the screen.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of flash 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 flash, 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).
