Word Type
jejune is an adjective:
- Not nutritious.
- Lacking matter; empty; devoid of substance.
- Naive; simplistic.
"1702: I have often wondered why some late Writers should sensure Tully's Letters for being too naked and jejune, when that to his Friend Lucceius, which the Reader will find in this Collection, is a plain Demonstration to the contrary? -- Thomas Brown, Select Epistles or Letters out of M. Tullius Cicero; and the best Roman, Greek and French Authors both Ancient and Modern"
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 →
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What type of word is jejune?
- Adjective usage: 1702: I have often wondered why some late Writers should sensure Tully's Letters for being too naked and jejune, when that to his Friend Lucceius, which the Reader will find in this Collection, is a plain Demonstration to the contrary? -- Thomas Brown, Select Epistles or Letters out of M. Tullius Cicero; and the best Roman, Greek and French Authors both Ancient and Modern
- Adjective usage: 1917: This renders the recognition of alternatives a paramount necessity for a logic of discovery, which can no longer dismiss them with a jejune chapter on 'disjunctive propositions'. — Charles Joseph Singer, Studies in the History and Method of Science
- Adjective usage: 1955 : Doubtless, too, both grammarians and philosophers have been aware that it is by no means easy to distinguish even questions, commands, and so on from statements by means of the few and jejune grammatical marks available, such as word order, mood, and the like : though perhaps it has not been usual to dwell on the difficulties which this fact obviously raises. - J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words
- Adjective usage: 1962: Gradus had long been a member of all sorts of jejune leftist organizations. — Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
- Adjective usage: 1975: Sonja (Diane Keaton): "That is incredibly jejune". Boris (Woody Allen): That's jejune? You have the temerity to say that I'm talking to you out of jejunosity? I am one of the most june people in all of the Russias!" - Woody Allen, Love And Death
- Adjective usage: 1993: I went to the cinema not for entertainment, but for cinematography. For it was only by studying the precise rake of extra-long pans, the trajectory of tracking shots and the jejune emotional appeal of the jump-cut, that I could add to the repertoire of my own internal shoots. — Will Self, My Idea of Fun
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of jejune 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 jejune, 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).
