Word Type
Material can be a noun or an adjective.
material used as a noun:
- Matter which may be shaped or manipulated, particularly in making something.
"Asphalt, composed of oil and sand, is a widely used material for roads." - A sample or specimens for study.
- Cloth to be made into a garment.
"You'll need about a yard of material to make this." - Things written to be performed.
"We were a warm-up act at the time; we didn't have enough original material to headline." - A person who is qualified for a certain position or activity.
"Joe Manchin is a great governor, and I also believe he is presidential material."
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 →
material used as an adjective:
- Having to do with matter.
"This compound has a number of interesting material properties." - Worldly, as opposed to spiritual.
"Don't let material concerns get in the way of living a good life." - Significant.
"You've made several material contributions to this project."
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 material?
- Noun usage: Asphalt, composed of oil and sand, is a widely used material for roads.
- Noun usage: You'll need about a yard of material to make this.
- Noun usage: We were a warm-up act at the time; we didn't have enough original material to headline.
- Noun usage: Joe Manchin is a great governor, and I also believe he is presidential material.
- Adjective usage: This compound has a number of interesting material properties.
- Adjective usage: Don't let material concerns get in the way of living a good life.
- Adjective usage: You've made several material contributions to this project.
- Adjective usage: This is the most material fact in this lawsuit.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of material 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 material, 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).
