Word Type
Flat can be an adverb, a noun or an adjective.
flat used as an adverb:
- So as to be flat.
"Spread the tablecloth flat over the table." - Bluntly.
"I asked him if he wanted to marry me and he turned me down flat." - Not exceeding.
"He can run a mile in four minutes flat." - Completely.
"I am flat broke this month."
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
flat used as a noun:
- An area of level ground.
- A note played a semitone lower than a natural, denoted by the symbol ♭ sign placed after the letter representing the note (e.g., B♭) or in front of the note symbol (e.g. ♭♪).
- A flat tyre/tire.
- An apartment.
- A type of ladies' shoes with very low heels.
"She liked to walk in her flats more than in her high heels." - A thin, broad brush used in oil and watercolor/watercolour painting.
- The flat part of something:
- # The flat side of a blade, as opposed to the sharp edge.
- # The palm of the hand, with the adjacent part of the fingers.
- A wide, shallow container.
"a flat of strawberries"
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 →
flat used as an adjective:
- Having no variations in altitude.
"The land around here is flat." - Deflated, especially because of a puncture.
- Lowered by one semitone.
- Of a note or voice, lower in pitch than it should be.
- Without variations in pitch.
- Of a carbonated drink, with all or most of its carbon dioxide having come out of solution so that the drink no longer fizzes or contains any bubbles.
- Uninteresting.
"The party was a bit flat." - Lacking acidity without being sweet.
- Absolute.
"His claim was in flat contradiction to experimental results." - Describing certain features, usually the breasts or buttocks, that are extremely small or not visible at all.
"That girl is completely flat on both sides." - Unable to generate power; dead.
- without spin; spinless.
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 flat?
- Adverb usage: Spread the tablecloth flat over the table.
- Adverb usage: I asked him if he wanted to marry me and he turned me down flat.
- Adverb usage: He can run a mile in four minutes flat.
- Adverb usage: I am flat broke this month.
- Noun usage: She liked to walk in her flats more than in her high heels.
- Noun usage: a flat of strawberries
- Adjective usage: The land around here is flat.
- Adjective usage: The party was a bit flat.
- Adjective usage: His claim was in flat contradiction to experimental results.
- Adjective usage: I'm not going to the party and that's flat.
- Adjective usage: That girl is completely flat on both sides.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of flat 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 flat, 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).
