Word Type
Mutter can be a noun or a verb.
mutter used as a noun:
- A repressed or obscure utterance; an instance of muttering.
"The prisoners were docile, and accepted their lot with barely a mutter." - (in Indian restaurants) peas
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 →
mutter used as a verb:
- To utter words, especially complaints or angry expressions, indistinctly or with a low voice and lips partly closed; to say under one's breath.
"You could hear the students mutter as they were served sodden spaghetti, yet again, in the cafeteria." - To speak softly and incoherently, or with imperfect articulations.
"The asylum inmate muttered some doggerel about chains and pains to himself, over and over." - To make a sound with a low, rumbling noise.
"April could hear the delivery van's engine muttering in the driveway near the kitchens."
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is mutter?
- Noun usage: The prisoners were docile, and accepted their lot with barely a mutter.
- Verb usage: You could hear the students mutter as they were served sodden spaghetti, yet again, in the cafeteria.
- Verb usage: The beggar muttered words of thanks, as passersby dropped coins in his cup.
- Verb usage: The asylum inmate muttered some doggerel about chains and pains to himself, over and over.
- Verb usage: April could hear the delivery van's engine muttering in the driveway near the kitchens.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of mutter 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 mutter, 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).
