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Lick can be a verb or a noun.

lick used as a verb:

  1. To stroke with the tongue.
    "The cat licked its fur."
  2. To defeat decisively, particularly in a fight.
    "My dad can lick your dad."
  3. To overcome.
    "I think I can lick this."
  4. To perform cunnilingus.
  5. To do anything partially.

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 →

lick used as a noun:

  1. The act of licking.
    "The cat gave its fur a lick."
  2. The amount of some substance obtainable with a single lick.
    "Give me a lick of ice cream."
  3. A place where animals lick minerals from the ground.
    "The birds gathered at the clay lick."
  4. A small watercourse or ephemeral stream. It ranks between a rill and a stream.
    "We used to play in the lick."
  5. A stroke or blow.
    "Hit that wedge a good lick with the sledgehammer."
  6. A bit.
    "You don't have a lick of sense."
  7. A short motif.
    "There are some really good blues licks in this solo."
  8. speed. In this sense it is always qualified by good, or fair or a similar adjective.
    "The bus was travelling at a good lick when it swerved and left the road."

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 lick?

As detailed above, 'lick' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: The cat licked its fur.
  2. Verb usage: My dad can lick your dad.
  3. Verb usage: I think I can lick this.
  4. Noun usage: The cat gave its fur a lick.
  5. Noun usage: Give me a lick of ice cream.
  6. Noun usage: The birds gathered at the clay lick.
  7. Noun usage: We used to play in the lick.
  8. Noun usage: Hit that wedge a good lick with the sledgehammer.
  9. Noun usage: You don't have a lick of sense.
  10. Noun usage: I didn't do a lick of work today.
  11. Noun usage: There are some really good blues licks in this solo.
  12. Noun usage: The bus was travelling at a good lick when it swerved and left the road.

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of lick 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 lick, 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).

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