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Now can be an adjective, a conjunction, an interjection, a noun or an adverb.

now used as an adjective:

  1. Present; current.
  2. Fashionable; popular.
    "I think this band's sound is very now."

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 →

now used as a conjunction:

  1. since, because, in light of the fact.
    "We can play football now that the rain has stopped."

Conjunctions are connector words. Examples of conjunctions are: and, but, so. They help us to group words and connect phrases, like in the sentence: "We have apples and oranges, but we need bananas." Learn more →

now used as an interjection:

  1. Indicates a signal to begin.
    "Now! Fire all we've got while the enemy is in reach!"

An interjection is an abrupt remark like Oh! or Dear me, or Eww. It is usually used to express the strong emotions of the speaker. The sentence 'Congratulations! You won the gold medal!' shows the use of 'congratulations' as an interjection. Learn more →

now used as a noun:

  1. The present time.
    "Now is the right time."
  2. # The state of not paying attention to the future or the past.
  3. #: She is living in the now.
  4. # A particular instant in time, as perceived at that instant.
  5. #* {{quote-book|##*|1982|Albert Hofstadter|The Basic Problems of Phenomenology|by=Martin Heidegger|pageurl=http://books.google.com/books?id=VmatHCLJ4Q4C&pg=PA249|page=249

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 →

now used as an adverb:

  1. At the present time.
    "Now I am six."

  2. "Now, we all want what is best for our children."
  3. Differently from the immediate past; differently from a more remote past or a possible future; differently from all other times.
    "Now I am ready."
  4. Differently from the situation before a (stated or implied) event or change of circumstance.
    "Now my whole life is different."
  5. At the time reached within a narration.
    "Now, he remembered why he had come."
  6. In the context of urgency.
    "Now listen, we must do something about this."

An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →

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What type of word is now?

As detailed above, 'now' can be an adjective, a conjunction, an interjection, a noun or an adverb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adjective usage: I think this band's sound is very now.
  2. Conjunction usage: We can play football now that the rain has stopped.
  3. Interjection usage: Now! Fire all we've got while the enemy is in reach!
  4. Noun usage: Now is the right time.
  5. Noun usage: There is no better time than now.
  6. Adverb usage: Now I am six.
  7. Adverb usage: Now, we all want what is best for our children.
  8. Adverb usage: Now, stop that Jimmy!
  9. Adverb usage: Now I am ready.
  10. Adverb usage: We all now want iPods for our children.
  11. Adverb usage: We all want what is now best for our children.
  12. Adverb usage: Now my whole life is different.
  13. Adverb usage: Now all the children have grown up and left, the house is very quiet.
  14. Adverb usage: Now, he remembered why he had come.
  15. Adverb usage: He now asked her whether she had made pudding.
  16. Adverb usage: The pudding was now ready to be served.
  17. Adverb usage: Now listen, we must do something about this.

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