Word Type
lay down is a verb:
- To give up, surrender, or yield (e.g. a weapon), usually by placing it on the ground.
"The police urged the gunman to lay down his weapon." - To specify, institute, enact, assert firmly, state authoritatively, establish or formulate (rules or policies).
"Let's lay down the rules right at the beginning, so we are consistent." - To stock, store (e.g. wine) for the future. See also lay by.
- To sacrifice, especially in the phrase "to lay down one's life."
- To lie down; to place oneself in a reclined or horizontal position, on a bed or similar, for the purpose of resting.
"I feel a bit ill, so I'm going to go lay down for a while."
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 lay down?
- Verb usage: The police urged the gunman to lay down his weapon.
- Verb usage: Lay down your arms.
- Verb usage: Let's lay down the rules right at the beginning, so we are consistent.
- Verb usage: You've got to lay down the law with that boy.
- Verb usage: I feel a bit ill, so I'm going to go lay down for a while.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of lay down 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 lay down, 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).
