Word Type
Orb can be a verb or a noun.
orb used as a verb:
- To form into an orb or circle. --Milton. Lowell.
- To encircle; to surround; to inclose.
- In the television programme/program Charmed, to utilize the type of teleportation particularly associated with whitelighters.
- To become round like an orb.
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 →
orb used as a noun:
- A spherical body; a globe; especially, one of the celestial spheres; a sun, planet, or star.
"In the small orb of one particular tear. --Shakespeare." - One of the azure transparent spheres conceived by the ancients to be inclosed one within another, and to carry the heavenly bodies in their revolutions.
- A circle; especially, a circle, or nearly circular orbit, described by the revolution of a heavenly body; an orbit.
"The schoolmen were like astronomers, which did feign eccentrics, and epicycles, and such engines of orbs. --Bacon." - A period of time marked off by the revolution of a heavenly body. --John Milton.
- The eye, as luminous and spherical.
"A drop serene hath quenched their orbs. --John Milton." - A revolving circular body; a wheel.
"The orbs Of his fierce chariot rolled. --John Milton." - A sphere of action. --William Wordsworth.
"But in our orbs we'll live so round and safe. --Shakespeare" - A globus cruciger.
- A translucent sphere appearing in flash photography.
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 orb?
- Noun usage: In the small orb of one particular tear. --Shakespeare.
- Noun usage: Whether the prime orb, Incredible how swift, had thither rolled. -- John Milton.
- Noun usage: The schoolmen were like astronomers, which did feign eccentrics, and epicycles, and such engines of orbs. --Bacon.
- Noun usage: You seem to me as Dian in her orb. --Shakespeare.
- Noun usage: In orbs Of circuit inexpressible they stood, Orb within orb. --John Milton.
- Noun usage: A drop serene hath quenched their orbs. --John Milton.
- Noun usage: The orbs Of his fierce chariot rolled. --John Milton.
- Noun usage: But in our orbs we'll live so round and safe. --Shakespeare
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of orb 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 orb, 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).
