Word Type
Ill can be an adjective, an adverb or a noun.
ill used as an adjective:
- Suffering from a disease.
"I've been ill with the flu for the past few days." - Having an urge to vomit.
"Seeing those pictures made me ill." - Bad, often connoting abuse or neglect.
"He suffered from ill treatment." - Sublime, with the connotation of being so in a singularly creative way. [This sense sometimes declines in AAVE as ill, comparative iller, superlative illest.]
"Biggie Smalls is the illest / Your style is played out, like Arnold wonderin "Whatchu talkin bout, Willis?" — Biggie Smalls, The What, 1994." - Extremely bad (bad enough to make one ill). Generally used indirectly with to be.
"That band was ill."
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 →
ill used as an adverb:
- Badly; very incompletely. Often hyphenated to form an adjectival phrase.
"That move was ill-planned and ill-executed." - Scarcely.
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
ill used as a noun:
- Trouble; distress; misfortune; adversity.
"Music won't solve all the world's ills, but it can make them easier to bear." - Harm or injury.
"I wouldn't want you to do me ill." - Evil; moral wrongfulness.
"Sociopaths do not seem to grasp the difference between good and ill." - A physical ailment; an illness.
"I am incapacitated by rheumatism and other ills." - Unfavorable remarks or opinions.
"Do not speak ill of the dead." - PCP.
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 ill?
- Adjective usage: I've been ill with the flu for the past few days.
- Adjective usage: Seeing those pictures made me ill.
- Adjective usage: He suffered from ill treatment.
- Adjective usage: Biggie Smalls is the illest / Your style is played out, like Arnold wonderin "Whatchu talkin bout, Willis?" — Biggie Smalls, The What, 1994.
- Adjective usage: That band was ill.
- Adverb usage: That move was ill-planned and ill-executed.
- Noun usage: Music won't solve all the world's ills, but it can make them easier to bear.
- Noun usage: I wouldn't want you to do me ill.
- Noun usage: Sociopaths do not seem to grasp the difference between good and ill.
- Noun usage: I am incapacitated by rheumatism and other ills.
- Noun usage: Do not speak ill of the dead.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of ill 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 ill, 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).
