Word Type
Overhead can be an adjective, an adverb or a noun.
overhead used as an adjective:
- located above, especially over the head
"Place your luggage in the overhead bins." - of, or relating to the operating expenses of a business
"They tried to reduce overhead costs."
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 →
overhead used as an adverb:
- above one's head;in the sky
"Birds flying overhead."
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
overhead used as a noun:
- The expense of a business not directly assigned to goods or services provided.
- The items or classes of expense not directly assigned to goods or services provided.
- Any cost or expenditure (monetary, time, effort or otherwise) incurred in a project or activity, which does not directly contribute to the progress or outcome of the project or activity.
- Wasted money.
- - An overhead smash is a tennis stroke when the ball is high enough to strike with an arm motion that allows the racquet to follow a path up and over the head of the person striking the ball.
- The ceiling of any enclosed space below decks in a vessel
- The system of overhead wires used to power electric transport, such as streetcars, trains, or buses.
- An overhead projector.
- A sheet of transparent material with an image used with an overhead projector; an overhead transparency.
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 overhead?
- Adjective usage: Place your luggage in the overhead bins.
- Adjective usage: They tried to reduce overhead costs.
- Adverb usage: Birds flying overhead.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of overhead 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 overhead, 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).