Word Type
Hack can be an adjective, a verb or a noun.
hack used as an adjective:
- Having or requiring little talent.
"He's nothing but the typical hack writer."
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 →
hack used as a verb:
- To chop or cut down in a rough manner.
"They hacked the brush down and made their way through the jungle." - To cough noisily.
"This cold is awful. I can't stop hacking." - To withstand or put up with a difficult situation.
"Can you hack it out here with no electricity or running water?" - To hack into; to gain unauthorized access to a computer system (e.g. website) or network by manipulating code; a crack.
- To accomplish a difficult programming task.
"He can hack like no one else and make the program work as expected." - To make a quick code change to patch a computer program.
"I hacked in a fix for this bug, but we'll still have to do a real fix later.." - To work on an intimately technical level.
"I'm currently hacking distributed garbage collection." - To strike an opponent's leg with one's hockey stick.
"He's going to the penalty box after hacking the defender in front of the goal." - A flailing attempt to hit the puck with a hockey stick.
"There's a scramble in front of the net as the forwards are hacking at the bouncing puck." - To swing at a pitched ball.
"He went to the batter's box hacking." - To lay (bricks) on a rack to dry.
- To keep (young hawks) in a state of partial freedom, before they are trained.
- To make common or cliched; to vulgarise.
- To ride a horse at a regular pace; to ride on a road (as opposed to riding cross-country etc.).
- To play hackeysack.
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 →
hack used as a noun:
- A hacking blow.
- A gouge or notch made by such a blow.
- The foothold traditionally cut into the ice from which the person who throws the rock pushes off for delivery.
- A mattock or a miner's pick.
- A dry cough.
- An illegal attempt to gain access to a computer network.
- An interesting technical achievement, particularly in computer programming.
- A small code change meant to patch a problem as quickly as possible.
- An expedient, temporary solution, meant to be replaced with a more elegant solution at a later date.
- Time check.
- A swing of the bat at a pitched ball by the batter.
"He took a few hacks, but the pitcher finally struck him out." - A board which the falcon's food is placed on; used by extension for the state of partial freedom in which they are kept before being trained.
- A food-rack for cattle.
- A rack used to dry bricks.
- An ordinary horse, especially an old, tired one.
- A taxicab (hackney cab) driver.
- One who is professionally successful despite producing mediocre work. (Usually applied to persons in a creative field.)
- A talented writer-for-hire, paid to put others' thoughts into felicitous language.
- An untalented writer.
"Dason is nothing but a two-bit hack." - A political agitator. (slightly derogatory)
- A small ball usually made of woven cotton or suede and filled with rice, sand or some other filler, for the use in hackeysack.
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 hack?
- Adjective usage: He's nothing but the typical hack writer.
- Adjective usage: I got by on hack work for years before I finally published my novel.
- Verb usage: They hacked the brush down and made their way through the jungle.
- Verb usage: This cold is awful. I can't stop hacking.
- Verb usage: Can you hack it out here with no electricity or running water?
- Verb usage: He can hack like no one else and make the program work as expected.
- Verb usage: I hacked in a fix for this bug, but we'll still have to do a real fix later..
- Verb usage: I'm currently hacking distributed garbage collection.
- Verb usage: He's going to the penalty box after hacking the defender in front of the goal.
- Verb usage: There's a scramble in front of the net as the forwards are hacking at the bouncing puck.
- Verb usage: He went to the batter's box hacking.
- Noun usage: He took a few hacks, but the pitcher finally struck him out.
- Noun usage: Dason is nothing but a two-bit hack.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of hack 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 hack, 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).