Word Type
How can be an adjective, a noun, a conjunction or an adverb.
how used as an adjective:
- In what state.
"How are you?"
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 →
how used as a noun:
- The means by which something is accomplished.
"I am not interested in the why, but in the how." - An artificial barrow or tumulus.
- A small hill in northern England. (Usage preserved mainly in place names.)
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 →
how used as a conjunction:
- In which way; in such way.
"I remember how to solve this puzzle."
Conjunctions are connector words. Examples of conjunctions are: and, but, so. They help us to group words and connect phrases, like in the sentence: "We have apples and oranges, but we need bananas." Learn more →
how used as an adverb:
- To what degree.
"How often do you practice?" - In what manner.
"How do you solve this puzzle?" -
"How very interesting!"
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is how?
- Adjective usage: How are you?
- Adjective usage: How was your vacation?
- Noun usage: I am not interested in the why, but in the how.
- Conjunction usage: I remember how to solve this puzzle.
- Adverb usage: How often do you practice?
- Adverb usage: How do you solve this puzzle?
- Adverb usage: How else can we get this finished?
- Adverb usage: How very interesting!
- Adverb usage: How wonderful it was to receive your invitation.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of how 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 how, 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).
