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

front used as a verb:

  1. To face (on, to), be pointed in a given direction.
  2. To face, be opposite to.
  3. To face up to, to meet head-on, to confront.
  4. To adorn the front of; to have on the front.
  5. To pronounce with the tongue in a front position.
  6. To act as a front (for); to cover (for).
  7. To lead or be the spokesperson of (a campaign, organisation etc.).
  8. To provide money or financial assistance in advance to.
  9. To assume false or disingenuous appearances.

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 →

front used as an adjective:

  1. Located at or near the front.
    "The front runner was thirty meters ahead of her nearest competitor."
  2. Of a vowel pronounced near the tip of the tongue.

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 →

front used as a noun:

  1. The foremost side of something or the end that faces the direction it normally moves.
  2. The side of a building with the main entrance.
  3. A person or institution acting as the public face of some other, covert group.
    "Officially it's a dry-cleaning shop, but everyone knows it's front for the mafia."
  4. The interface or transition zone between two airmasses of different density, often resulting in precipitation. Since the temperature distribution is the most important regulator of atmospheric density, a front almost invariably separates airmasses of different temperature.
  5. An area where armies are engaged in conflict, especially the line of contact.
  6. The lateral space occupied by an element measured from the extremity of one flank to the extremity of the other flank.
  7. The direction of the enemy.
  8. When a combat situation does not exist or is not assumed, the direction toward which the command is faced.
  9. A major military subdivision of the Soviet Army.
  10. An act, show, façade, persona: an intentional and false impression of oneself.
    "He says he likes hip-hop, but I think it's just a front."

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 front?

As detailed above, 'front' can be a verb, an adjective or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adjective usage: The front runner was thirty meters ahead of her nearest competitor.
  2. Noun usage: Officially it's a dry-cleaning shop, but everyone knows it's front for the mafia.
  3. Noun usage: He says he likes hip-hop, but I think it's just a front.
  4. Noun usage: You don't need to put on a front. Just be yourself.

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