Word Type
Knot can be a verb or a noun.
knot used as a verb:
- To form into a knot; tie with (a) knot(s).
"We knotted the ends of the rope to keep it from unravelling." - To form wrinkles in the forehead, as a sign of concentration, concern, surprise, etc.
"She knotted her brow in concentration while attempting to unravel the tangled strands."
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 →
knot used as a noun:
- A looping of a piece of string or of any other long, flexible material that cannot be untangled without passing one or both ends of the material through its loops.
"Climbers must make sure that all knots are both secure and of types that will not weaken the rope." - A tangled clump.
"The nurse was brushing knots from the protesting child's hair." - A maze-like pattern.
- A closed curve that is an abstraction of a knot (in sense 1 above).
- A difficult situation.
"I got into a knot when I inadvertently insulted the policeman." - A unit of speed, equal to one nautical mile per hour.
"Cedric claimed his beat-up old yacht could make 20 knots, if he would just make a few repairs, but we figured he was pulling our leg." - Either of two species of small wading birds, the red knot (Calidris canutus) and the great knot (Calidris tenuirostris).
- The whorl left in lumber by the base of a branch growing out of the tree's trunk.
"When preparing to tell stories at a campfire, I like to set aside a pile of pine logs with lots of knots, since they burn brighter and make dramatic pops and cracks." - Local swelling in a tissue area, especially skin, often due to injury.
"Jeremy had a knot on his head where he had bumped it on the bedframe." - A group of people or things.
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 knot?
- Verb usage: We knotted the ends of the rope to keep it from unravelling.
- Verb usage: She knotted her brow in concentration while attempting to unravel the tangled strands.
- Noun usage: Climbers must make sure that all knots are both secure and of types that will not weaken the rope.
- Noun usage: The nurse was brushing knots from the protesting child's hair.
- Noun usage: I got into a knot when I inadvertently insulted the policeman.
- Noun usage: Cedric claimed his beat-up old yacht could make 20 knots, if he would just make a few repairs, but we figured he was pulling our leg.
- Noun usage: When preparing to tell stories at a campfire, I like to set aside a pile of pine logs with lots of knots, since they burn brighter and make dramatic pops and cracks.
- Noun usage: Jeremy had a knot on his head where he had bumped it on the bedframe.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of knot 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 knot, 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).
