Word Type
Grain can be a verb or a noun.
grain used as a verb:
- To feed grain to.
- To make granular; to form into grains.
- To texture a surface in imitation of the grain of a substance such as wood.
- To remove the hair or fat from a skin.
- To soften leather.
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 →
grain used as a noun:
- The harvested seeds of various grass-related food crops eg: wheat, corn, barley.
"We stored a thousand tons of grain for the winter." - A single seed of grain.
"a grain of wheat" - The crops from which grain is harvested.
"The fields were planted with grain." - A linear texture of a material or surface.
"Cut along the grain of the wood." - A single particle of a substance.
"a grain of sand" - A very small unit of weight, in England equal to 1/480 of an ounce troy, 0.0648 grams or, to be more exact, 64.79891 milligrams. A carat grain or pearl grain is 1/4 carat or 50 milligrams. The old French grain was 1/9216 livre or 53.11 milligrams, and in the mesures usuelles permitted from 1812 to 1839, with the livre redefined as 500 grams, it was 54.25 milligrams.
- (materials) A region within a material having a single crystal structure or direction.
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is grain?
- Noun usage: We stored a thousand tons of grain for the winter.
- Noun usage: a grain of wheat
- Noun usage: The fields were planted with grain.
- Noun usage: Cut along the grain of the wood.
- Noun usage: a grain of sand
- Noun usage: a grain of salt
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of grain 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 grain, 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).
