Word Type
Keen can be a verb, a noun or an adjective.
keen used as a verb:
- To sharpen; to make cold.
""Cold winter keens the brightening flood." -Thomson." - To utter a keen.
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 →
keen used as a noun:
- A prolonged wail for a deceased person.
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 →
keen used as an adjective:
- sharp; having a fine edge or point.
""That my keen knife see not the wound it makes." -Shak." - acute of mind; sharp; penetrating; having or expressing mental acuteness.
""To make our wits more keen." -Shak." - bitter; piercing; acrimonious; cutting; stinging; severe; as, keen satire or sarcasm.
""Good father cardinal, cry thou amen to my keen curses." -Shak." - piercing; penetrating; cutting; sharp; -- applied to cold, wind, etc,; as, a keen wind; the cold is very keen.
""Breasts the keen air, and carols as he goes." -Goldsmith." - eager; vehement; fierce; as, a keen appetite.
""Of full keen will." -Piers Plowman." - Enthusiastic
"I'm keen to learn another language." - Marvelous.
"I just got this peachy keen new dress."
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is keen?
- Verb usage: "Cold winter keens the brightening flood." -Thomson.
- Adjective usage: "That my keen knife see not the wound it makes." -Shak.
- Adjective usage: "To make our wits more keen." -Shak.
- Adjective usage: "Before the keen inquiry of her thought." -Cowper.
- Adjective usage: "Good father cardinal, cry thou amen to my keen curses." -Shak.
- Adjective usage: "Breasts the keen air, and carols as he goes." -Goldsmith.
- Adjective usage: "Of full keen will." -Piers Plowman.
- Adjective usage: "So keen and greedy to confound a man." -Shak.
- Adjective usage: I'm keen to learn another language.
- Adjective usage: I'm keen on learning another language.
- Adjective usage: I'm keen on languages.
- Adjective usage: "Do you want to learn another language?" / "I'm keen."
- Adjective usage: I just got this peachy keen new dress.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of keen 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 keen, 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).
