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Patch can be a proper noun, a noun or a verb.

patch used as a proper noun:

  1. The program that updates old versions of files, based on a record of differences with the newer versions.

A proper noun is a refers to a single, specific person/thing/entity and is used to refer to that person/entity/thing. Examples are London, Jupiter, Sarah, or Microsoft. Proper nouns are distinguished from common nouns, which are words that refer to a class/category of entities (like 'chair', 'grape', and 'computer'). Learn more →

patch used as a noun:

  1. A piece of cloth, or other suitable material, sewed or otherwise fixed upon a garment to repair or strengthen it, esp. upon an old garment to cover a hole.
  2. A small piece of anything used to repair a breach; as, a patch on a kettle, a roof, etc.
  3. A small piece of black silk stuck on the face, or neck, to hide a defect, or to heighten beauty.
  4. A piece of greased cloth or leather used as wrapping for a rifle ball, to make it fit the bore.
  5. A small area, a small piece of ground; a tract; a plot; as, scattered patches of trees or growing corn.
  6. A period of time.
    "The world economy had a rough patch in the 1930s."
  7. A fit.
  8. A block on the muzzle of a gun, to do away with the effect of dispart, in sighting.
  9. A paltry fellow; a rogue; a ninny; a fool.
  10. A file describing changes made to a computer file or files, usually changes made to a computer program that fix a programming bug. A patch file, a file used for input to a patch program.
  11. An adhesive piece of material, impregnated with a drug, which is worn on the skin; the drug being slowly absorbed over a period of time.
  12. A small piece of material that is manually passed through a gun barrel to clean it.
  13. (Often patch cable, patch cord etc.; see also patch panel) A cable connecting two pieces of electrical equipment.

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 →

patch used as a verb:

  1. To mend by sewing on a piece or pieces of cloth, leather, or the like; as, to patch a coat.
  2. To mend with pieces; to repair with pieces fastened on.
  3. To repair clumsily; as, to patch the roof of a house.
  4. To adorn, as the face, with a patch or patches.
  5. To make of pieces or patches like a quilt.
  6. To repair as with patches.
  7. To arrange in a hasty or clumsy manner; – generally with up; as, to patch up a truce.
  8. To make the changes a patch describes; to apply a patch to the files in question. Hence:
  9. # To fix or improve a computer program without a complete upgrade.
  10. # To make a quick and possibly temporary change to a program.
  11. To connect two pieces of electrical equipment using a cable.
    "I'll need to patch the preamp output to the mixer"

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 →

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What type of word is patch?

As detailed above, 'patch' can be a proper noun, a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: The world economy had a rough patch in the 1930s.
  2. Verb usage: I'll need to patch the preamp output to the mixer

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of patch 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 patch, 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).

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