Word Type
footstep is a noun:
- The mark or impression left by a foot; a track.
"The child watched as his footsteps in the sand were washed away by the waves." - By extension, the indications or waypoints of a course or direction taken.
"To walk the footsteps of greatness requires that you start at the bottom of a long stair." - The sound made by walking, running etc.
"The footsteps of the students echoed in the empty hall." - A step, as in a stair.
"The garden path had a small footstep down to the main walkway." - The distance between one foot and the next when walking; a pace.
"Mere footsteps away from the victim lay the murder weapon." - The act of taking a step.
"Take one more footstep towards me, and I'll make you sorry!" - An inclined plane under a hand printing press.
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 footstep?
- Noun usage: The child watched as his footsteps in the sand were washed away by the waves.
- Noun usage: To walk the footsteps of greatness requires that you start at the bottom of a long stair.
- Noun usage: The footsteps of the students echoed in the empty hall.
- Noun usage: The garden path had a small footstep down to the main walkway.
- Noun usage: Mere footsteps away from the victim lay the murder weapon.
- Noun usage: Take one more footstep towards me, and I'll make you sorry!
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of footstep 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 footstep, 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).
