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Mass can be a verb or a noun.

mass used as a verb:

  1. To celebrate mass.
  2. To form or collect into a mass; to form into a collective body; to bring together into masses; to assemble.
    "Coleridge — But mass them together and they are terrible indeed."

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 →

mass used as a noun:

  1. The Eucharist, now especially in Roman Catholicism.
  2. Celebration of the Eucharist.
  3. The sacrament of the Eucharist.
  4. A musical setting of parts of the mass.
  5. A quantity of matter cohering together so as to make one body, or an aggregation of particles or things which collectively make one body or quantity, usually of considerable size; as, a mass of ore, metal, sand, or water.
    "Savile — A deep mass of continual sea is slower stirred to rage"
  6. A large quantity; a sum.
    "[[w:Walter Raleigh|Sir Walter Raleigh|]] — All the mass of gold that comes into Spain."
  7. Bulk; magnitude; body; size.
    "Shakespeare, Hamlet, IV,iv — This army of such mass and charge"
  8. The principal part; the main body.
    "Benjamin Jowett (Thucydides) — Night closed upon the pursuit, and aided the mass of the fugitives in their escape"
  9. The quantity of matter which a body contains, irrespective of its bulk or volume. It is one of four fundamental properties of matter. It is measured in kilograms in the SI system of measurement.
  10. A medicinal substance made into a cohesive, homogeneous lump, of consistency suitable for making pills; as, blue mass.
  11. A palpable or visible abnormal globular structure; a tumor.
  12. Excess body weight, especially in the form of muscle hypertrophy.

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 mass?

As detailed above, 'mass' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: Coleridge — But mass them together and they are terrible indeed.
  2. Noun usage: Savile — A deep mass of continual sea is slower stirred to rage
  3. Noun usage: [[w:Walter Raleigh|Sir Walter Raleigh|]] — All the mass of gold that comes into Spain.
  4. Noun usage: Sir John Davies — He had spent a huge mass of treasure.
  5. Noun usage: Shakespeare, Hamlet, IV,iv — This army of such mass and charge
  6. Noun usage: Benjamin Jowett (Thucydides) — Night closed upon the pursuit, and aided the mass of the fugitives in their escape

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