Word Type
Own can be a verb or an adjective.
own used as a verb:
- To have rightful possession of (property, goods or capital); "To possess by right; to have the right of property in; to have the legal right or rightful title to." (Ref 1)
"I own this car." - To claim as one's own; to answer to.
- To defeat or embarrass; to overwhelm.
"I will own my enemies." - To virtually or figuratively enslave.
- To illicitly obtain "super-user" or "root" access into a computer system thereby having access to all of the user files on that system; pwn.
- To admit to be true; concede, grant, allow, acknowledge, confess; not to deny; to admit to be true. (Ref 2)
- To acknowledge or admit the possession or ownership of. (Ref 3)
- To recognise, to acknowledge responsibility for, to admit to be true.
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 →
own used as an adjective:
- Belonging to; possessed; proper to;
"Surprisingly, I realised my own brother had the same idea as me." - peculiar, domestic;
- not foreign;
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 own?
- Verb usage: I own this car.
- Verb usage: I will own my enemies.
- Verb usage: If he wins, he will own you.
- Adjective usage: Surprisingly, I realised my own brother had the same idea as me.
- Adjective usage: You need to find your own seat - this one is mine.
- Adjective usage: He gave her a pen, because he already had his own.
- Adjective usage: The restored Maxwell is Bob's own car.
- Adjective usage: They went this way, but we need to find our own way.
- Adjective usage: We have made some arrangements, but you will need to make your own.
- Adjective usage: They were all prepared for the picnic, because they had all brought their own food and plates.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of own 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 own, 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).
