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It can be a noun, an abbreviation or a pronoun.

it used as a noun:

  1. The person or people who chase and try to catch the other players in the playground game of .
    "In the next game, Adam and Tom will be it…"
  2. the game of tag itself.
    "Let's play it at breaktime."
  3. IT (used by schoolchildren).
    "What have we got next? Art then it."

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 →

it used as an abbreviation:

  1. Italian.
  2. Italy.

An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. The term "Rd" is a commobly used abbreviation of "Road". Learn more →

it used as a pronoun:

  1. The third-person singular personal pronoun used to refer to a non-human entity, to an inanimate thing with no or unknown sex or gender.
    "Put it over there."
  2. The third-person singular personal pronoun used to refer to a human entity of unknown sex or gender.
    "She took the baby and held it in her arms."
  3. Used to refer to oneself when identifying oneself, often on the phone, but not limited to this situation.
    "It's me. John."
  4. The impersonal pronoun, used without referent as the subject of an impersonal verb or statement.
    "It is nearly 10 o’clock."
  5. The impersonal pronoun, used as a placeholder for a delayed subject, or less commonly, object.
    "It is easy to see how she would think that."

A pronoun is a placeholder for a noun. Examples of pronouns are: them, he, they, it. Pronouns make sentences shorter and clearer since they replace nouns. For example, instead of saying 'Emily was happy, so Emily smiled.' you can say 'Emily was happy, so she smiled.' Learn more →

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What type of word is it?

As detailed above, 'it' can be a noun, an abbreviation or a pronoun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: In the next game, Adam and Tom will be it
  2. Noun usage: Let's play it at breaktime.
  3. Noun usage: What have we got next? Art then it.
  4. Pronoun usage: Put it over there.
  5. Pronoun usage: Take each day as it comes.
  6. Pronoun usage: She took the baby and held it in her arms.
  7. Pronoun usage: It's me. John.
  8. Pronoun usage: It is nearly 10 o’clock.
  9. Pronoun usage: It’s very cold today.
  10. Pronoun usage: It’s lonely without you.
  11. Pronoun usage: It is easy to see how she would think that.
  12. Pronoun usage: I find it odd that you would say that.
  13. Pronoun usage: He saw to it that everyone would vote for him.

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