Word Type
Keep can be a noun or a verb.
keep used as a noun:
- Care, notice.
- The main tower of a castle or fortress, located within the castle walls.
- The food or money required to keep someone alive and healthy; one's support, maintenance.
"He works as a cobbler's apprentice for his keep."
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 →
keep used as a verb:
- To maintain possession of.
"I keep a small stock of painkillers for emergencies." - To maintain the condition of.
"I keep my specimens under glass to protect them." - To remain in, to be confined to.
- To wait for, keep watch for.
- To restrain.
"I keep my brother out of trouble by keeping him away from his friends and hard at work." - To continue.
"I keep taking the tablets, but to no avail." - To remain edible or otherwise usable.
"Potatoes can keep if they are in a root cellar." - To remain in a state.
"The rabbit avoided detection by keeping still." - To act as wicket-keeper.
"Godfrey Evans kept for England for many years." - to raise; to care for.
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 →
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What type of word is keep?
- Noun usage: He works as a cobbler's apprentice for his keep.
- Verb usage: I keep a small stock of painkillers for emergencies.
- Verb usage: I keep my specimens under glass to protect them.
- Verb usage: I keep my brother out of trouble by keeping him away from his friends and hard at work.
- Verb usage: I keep taking the tablets, but to no avail.
- Verb usage: Potatoes can keep if they are in a root cellar.
- Verb usage: Latex paint won't keep indefinitely.
- Verb usage: The rabbit avoided detection by keeping still.
- Verb usage: Godfrey Evans kept for England for many years.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of keep 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 keep, 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).