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Fly can be an adjective, a verb or a noun.

fly used as an adjective:

  1. Quick-witted, mentally sharp, smart (in a mental sense).
  2. Well dressed, smart in appearance.
    "He's pretty fly for a white guy."

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 →

fly used as a verb:

  1. To travel through the air.
    "Birds of passage fly to warmer regions as it gets colder in winter."
  2. To flee, to escape.
    "Fly, my lord! The enemy are upon us!"
  3. To cause to move through the air, to transport by air.
    "Charles Lindbergh flew his airplane The Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic ocean."
  4. To be accepted.
    "Let's see if that idea flies."
  5. To hit a fly ball; to hit a fly ball which is caught for an out. Compare ground (verb) and line (verb).
    "Jones flied to right in his last at-bat."

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 →

fly used as a noun:

  1. Any insect of the order Diptera; characterized by having two wings, also called true flies.
  2. Especially, any of the insects of the family Muscidae, such as the common housefly (other families of Diptera include mosquitoes and midges).
  3. Any similar, but unrelated insect such as dragonfly or butterfly.
  4. A lightweight fishing lure resembling an insect.
  5. A chest exercise performed by moving extended arms from the sides to in front of the chest. (also flye)
  6. The action of flying; flight.
  7. An act of flying.
    "We had a quick half-hour fly back into the city."
  8. A fly ball.
  9. A type of small, fast carriage.
  10. A piece of canvas that covers the opening at the front of a tent.
  11. A strip of material hiding the zipper, buttons etc. at the front of a pair of trousers, pants, or underpants.
  12. The free edge of a flag.
  13. The horizontal length of a flag.

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 fly?

As detailed above, 'fly' can be an adjective, a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adjective usage: He's pretty fly for a white guy.
  2. Verb usage: Birds of passage fly to warmer regions as it gets colder in winter.
  3. Verb usage: The Concorde flew from Paris to New York faster than any other passenger airplane.
  4. Verb usage: It takes about eleven hours to fly from Frankfurt to Hongkong.
  5. Verb usage: The little fairy flew home on the back of her friend, the giant eagle.
  6. Verb usage: Fly, my lord! The enemy are upon us!
  7. Verb usage: Charles Lindbergh flew his airplane The Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic ocean.
  8. Verb usage: Why don’t you go outside and fly kites, kids? The wind is just perfect.
  9. Verb usage: Birds fly their prey to their nest to feed it to their young.
  10. Verb usage: Each day the post flies thousands of letters around the globe.
  11. Verb usage: Let's see if that idea flies.
  12. Verb usage: Jones flied to right in his last at-bat.
  13. Noun usage: We had a quick half-hour fly back into the city.

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of fly 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 fly, 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).

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