Word Type
Needle can be a verb or a noun.
needle used as a verb:
- To pierce with a needle, especially for sewing or acupuncture.
- To tease in order to provoke; to poke fun at.
"Billy needled his sister incessantly about her pimples."
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 →
needle used as a noun:
- A long, thin, sharp implement usually for piercing such as sewing, or knitting, acupuncture, tattooing, body piercing, medical injections etc.
"The seamstress threaded the needle to sew on a button." - A long, thin device for indicating measurements on a dial or graph, e.g. a compass needle.
"The needle on the fuel gauge pointed to empty." - A sensor for playing phonograph records, a phonograph stylus.
"Ziggy bought some diamond needles for his hi-fi phonograph." - A long, pointed leaf found on some conifers.
"I boiled some of the needles from the Christmas tree to add a pleasing scent to the air." - A weapon used in ancient China, and today by Shaolin monks.
- The death penalty carried out by lethal injection
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is needle?
- Verb usage: Billy needled his sister incessantly about her pimples.
- Noun usage: The seamstress threaded the needle to sew on a button.
- Noun usage: The needle on the fuel gauge pointed to empty.
- Noun usage: Ziggy bought some diamond needles for his hi-fi phonograph.
- Noun usage: I boiled some of the needles from the Christmas tree to add a pleasing scent to the air.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of needle 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 needle, 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).
