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Open can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.

open used as a noun:

  1. A sports event in which anybody can contest; as, the Australian Open.
  2. a wire that is broken midway.
    "The electrician found the open in the circuit after a few minutes of testing."
  3. (with the) Open or unobstructed space; an exposed location.
    "I can't believe you left the lawnmower out in the open when you knew it was going to rain this afternoon!"
  4. (with the) Public knowledge or scrutiny; full view.
    "We have got to bring this company's corrupt business practices into the open."

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 →

open used as an adjective:

  1. Which is not closed; accessible; unimpeded; as, an open gate.
    "Turn left after the second open door."
  2. Actively conducting or prepared to conduct business.
    "Banks are not open on bank holidays."
  3. Receptive.
    "I am open to new ideas."
  4. Public; as, an open letter, an open declaration.
    "He published an open letter to the governor on a full page of the New York Times."
  5. Candid, ingenuous, not subtle in character:
    "The man is an open book."
  6. Having a free variable.
  7. Is part of a predefined collection of subsets of X, that defines a topological space on X.
  8. In current use; mapped to part of memory.
    "I couldn't save my changes because another user had the same file open."

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 →

open used as a verb:

  1. To make something accessible or removing an obstacle to something being accessible.
    "Turn the doorknob to open the door."
  2. To bring up (a topic).
    "I don't want to open that subject."
  3. To make accessible to customers or clients.
    "I will open the shop an hour early tomorrow."
  4. To start (a campaign).
    "Vermont will open elk hunting season next week."
  5. To become open.
    "The door opened all by itself."
  6. To begin conducting business.
    "The shop opens at 9:00."
  7. To begin a side's innings as one of the first two batsmen.
  8. To bet before any other player has in a particular betting round in a game of poker.
    "After the first two players fold, Julie opens for $5."
  9. To reveal one's hand.
    "Jeff opens his hand revealing a straight flush."
  10. To load into memory for viewing or editing.

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 →

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What type of word is open?

As detailed above, 'open' can be a noun, an adjective or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: The electrician found the open in the circuit after a few minutes of testing.
  2. Noun usage: I can't believe you left the lawnmower out in the open when you knew it was going to rain this afternoon!
  3. Noun usage: Wary of hunters, the fleeing deer kept well out of the open, dodging instead from thicket to thicket.
  4. Noun usage: We have got to bring this company's corrupt business practices into the open.
  5. Adjective usage: Turn left after the second open door.
  6. Adjective usage: It was as if his body had gone to sleep standing up and with his eyes open.
  7. Adjective usage: Banks are not open on bank holidays.
  8. Adjective usage: I am open to new ideas.
  9. Adjective usage: He published an open letter to the governor on a full page of the New York Times.
  10. Adjective usage: The man is an open book.
  11. Adjective usage: I couldn't save my changes because another user had the same file open.
  12. Verb usage: Turn the doorknob to open the door.
  13. Verb usage: I don't want to open that subject.
  14. Verb usage: I will open the shop an hour early tomorrow.
  15. Verb usage: Vermont will open elk hunting season next week.
  16. Verb usage: The door opened all by itself.
  17. Verb usage: The shop opens at 9:00.
  18. Verb usage: After the first two players fold, Julie opens for $5.
  19. Verb usage: Jeff opens his hand revealing a straight flush.

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