Word Type
Out can be an adverb, a preposition, a noun, a verb or an adjective.
out used as an adverb:
- Away from home or one's usual place, or not indoors.
"Let's eat out tonight" - Away from; at a distance.
"Keep out!" - Away from the inside or the centre.
"The magician pulled the rabbit out of the hat." - Into a state of non-operation; into non-existence.
"Switch the lights out." - Used to intensify or emphasize.
"The place was all decked out for the holidays." - Of a player, disqualified from playing further by some action of a member of the opposing team (such as being stumped in cricket).
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
out used as a preposition:
- Away from the inside.
"He threw it out the door." - Away from the center.
Prepositions are used to show the relationship between a noun or pronoun and another word. Examples of prepositions are: in, during, beside, after, for. In the sentence "Sows suffer in factory farms." The preposition "in" tells us the position of the sow relative to the factory farm. Learn more →
out used as a noun:
- A means of exit, escape, reprieve, etc.
"They wrote the law to give those organizations an out." - A state in which a member of the batting team is removed from play because the defending team threw the baseball past the batter three times in the strike zone, fielded a ball hit in the air, or fielded a ball hit to the ground and moved the ball to a defender blocking the runner's ability to move from base to base.
- A card which can make a hand a winner.
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 →
out used as a verb:
- To reveal (a person) to be secretly homosexual.
- To reveal (a person) as having a certain secret.
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 →
out used as an adjective:
- Of a player, disqualified from playing further by some action of a member of the opposing team (such as being stumped in cricket).
- Openly acknowledging one's homosexuality.
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is out?
- Adverb usage: Let's eat out tonight
- Adverb usage: Leave a message with my secretary if I'm out when you call.
- Adverb usage: Keep out!
- Adverb usage: The magician pulled the rabbit out of the hat.
- Adverb usage: Switch the lights out.
- Adverb usage: Put the fire out.
- Adverb usage: The place was all decked out for the holidays.
- Preposition usage: He threw it out the door.
- Noun usage: They wrote the law to give those organizations an out.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of out 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 out, 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).
