Word Type
lay-by is a noun:
- A paved area at the side of a highway designated for drivers to stop in, for emergency parking, or where vehicles can wait, with larger lay-bys possibly having facilities like food vendors or public telephones.
- A railroad siding; a second, short railroad track just to the side of a railroad track, connected with the main track by a switch and used for unloading, bypassing, etc.
- A widened section of a narrow river or canal, formed to one side so as to leave the channel free, for mooring of vessels, where vessels can lay over or allow others to pass.
- A method of retail purchase in which the customer chooses goods and the shop sets them aside and lets the customer pay them off over time, with the customer receiving them when fully paid. US/UK: .
"1930: Avail yourself of our Lay-By Service — Hordern Brothers (a Sydney retailer) advertisement, 16 October 1930."
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 →
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What type of word is lay-by?
- Noun usage: 1930: Avail yourself of our Lay-By Service — Hordern Brothers (a Sydney retailer) advertisement, 16 October 1930.
- Noun usage: 1931: enables you to secure Sale Bargains without the necessity of paying in full at once. Leave a deposit, pay the balance as it suits you, and on the completion of payments the goods will be delivered in the usual way. No interest is charged. — Anthony Hordern (another Sydney retailer), advertisement describing what they called their D.P.S., January 1931
- Noun usage: Both quoted in Sidney J. Baker, The Australian Language, second edition, 1966, chapter X, section 2, page 206.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of lay-by 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-by, 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).
