Word Type
Focus can be a noun or a verb.
focus used as a noun:
- a point at which reflected or refracted rays of light converge.
"The heat of sunlight at the focus of a magnifying glass can easily set dry leaves on fire." - a point of a conic at which rays reflected from a curve or surface converge.
- The fact of the convergence of light on the photographic medium.
"Unfortunately, the license plate is out of focus in this image." - The quality of the convergence of light on the photographic medium.
"During this scene, the boy’s face shifts subtly from soft focus into sharp focus." - concentration of attention.
"I believe I can bring the high degree of focus required for this important job." - the exact point of where an earthquake occurs, in three dimensions.
"The earthquake's focus was at exactly 37 degrees north, 18 degrees south, seventy five meters below the ground." - The indicator of the currently active element in a user interface.
"Text entered at the keyboard or pasted from a clipboard is sent to the component which currently has the focus." - The most important word or phrase in a sentence or passage, or the one that imparts information
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 →
focus used as a verb:
- To cause (rays of light, etc) to converge at a single point.
- To adjust (a lens, an optical instrument) in order to position an image with respect to the focal plane.
"You'll need to focus the microscope carefully in order to capture the full detail of this surface." - To concentrate one's attention.
"Focus on passing the test." - To make (a liquid) less diluted.
- To concentrate one's attention.
"If you're going to beat your competitors, you need to focus."
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 focus?
- Noun usage: The heat of sunlight at the focus of a magnifying glass can easily set dry leaves on fire.
- Noun usage: Unfortunately, the license plate is out of focus in this image.
- Noun usage: During this scene, the boy’s face shifts subtly from soft focus into sharp focus.
- Noun usage: I believe I can bring the high degree of focus required for this important job.
- Noun usage: The earthquake's focus was at exactly 37 degrees north, 18 degrees south, seventy five meters below the ground.
- Noun usage: Text entered at the keyboard or pasted from a clipboard is sent to the component which currently has the focus.
- Verb usage: You'll need to focus the microscope carefully in order to capture the full detail of this surface.
- Verb usage: Focus on passing the test.
- Verb usage: If you're going to beat your competitors, you need to focus.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of focus 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 focus, 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).
