Word Type
Pair can be a verb or a noun.
pair used as a verb:
- To put two (people, sets or things) together.
"The wedding guests were paired boy-girl and groom's party-bride's party" - To bring two (animals, notably dogs) together for mating.
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 →
pair used as a noun:
- Two similar or identical things taken together; often followed by of.
"I couldn't decide which of the pair of designer shirts I preferred, so I bought the pair." - Two people in a relationship, partnership (especially sexual) or friendship.
"Spouses should make a great pair." - Used with binary nouns (often in the plural to indicate multiple instances, since such nouns are plurale tantum)
"a pair of scissors; two pairs of spectacles; several pairs of jeans" - A couple of working animals attached to work together, as by a yoke.
"A pair is harder to drive than two mounts with separate riders." - A poker hand that contains of two cards of identical rank, which cannot also count as a better hand.
- A score of zero runs (a duck) in both innings of a two-innings match
- A double play, two outs recorded in one play
"They turned a pair to end the fifth." - A doubleheader, two games played on the same day between the same teams
"The Pirates took a pair from the Phillies." - A pair of breasts
"She's got a gorgeous pair."
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 pair?
- Verb usage: The wedding guests were paired boy-girl and groom's party-bride's party
- Noun usage: I couldn't decide which of the pair of designer shirts I preferred, so I bought the pair.
- Noun usage: Spouses should make a great pair.
- Noun usage: a pair of scissors; two pairs of spectacles; several pairs of jeans
- Noun usage: but not a pair of cymbals
- Noun usage: A pair is harder to drive than two mounts with separate riders.
- Noun usage: They turned a pair to end the fifth.
- Noun usage: The Pirates took a pair from the Phillies.
- Noun usage: She's got a gorgeous pair.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of pair 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 pair, 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).
