Word Type
Likely can be an adverb or an adjective.
likely used as an adverb:
- Similarly.
- Probably.
"Likely he'll win the election in this economy."
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
likely used as an adjective:
- probable; having a greater-than-even chance of occurring
"Rain is likely later this afternoon." - probable; Possessing or displaying the qualities or characteristics that make something probable
"They are likely to become angry with him." - appropriate, suitable; believable; having a good potential
"Jones is a likely candidate for management." - plausible; Within the realm of credibility
"not a very likely excuse." - promising; Apt to achieve success or yield a desired outcome
"a likely topic for investigation." - attractive; pleasant
"found a likely spot under a shady tree for the picnic."
Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is likely?
- Adverb usage: Likely he'll win the election in this economy.
- Adjective usage: Rain is likely later this afternoon.
- Adjective usage: They are likely to become angry with him.
- Adjective usage: Jones is a likely candidate for management.
- Adjective usage: not a very likely excuse.
- Adjective usage: a likely topic for investigation.
- Adjective usage: found a likely spot under a shady tree for the picnic.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of likely 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 likely, 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).
