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Period can be an adjective, an interjection or a noun.

period used as an adjective:

  1. Appropriate for a given historical era.

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 →

period used as an interjection:

  1. And nothing else; and nothing less; used for emphasis.
    "When I say "eat your dinner," it means "eat your dinner," period!"

An interjection is an abrupt remark like Oh! or Dear me, or Eww. It is usually used to express the strong emotions of the speaker. The sentence 'Congratulations! You won the gold medal!' shows the use of 'congratulations' as an interjection. Learn more →

period used as a noun:

  1. Punctuation mark “” (indicating the ending of a sentence or marking an abbreviation).
  2. A length of time.
    "There was a period of confusion following the announcement."
  3. An epoch, era, time in history or in a person's life.
    "Food rationing continued in the post-war period."
  4. A specific length of time that an activity (such as a game or a school day) is conventionally divided into.
    "Gretzky scored in the last minute of the second period."
  5. The minimum interval during which the same characteristics of a periodic phenomenon recur, such as the repetition of a wave or the rotation of a planet.
  6. Female menstruation.
    "When she is on her period she can be more disagreeable than usual"
  7. A row in the periodic table of the elements.
  8. A Drosophila gene which gene product is involved in regulation of the circadian rhythm

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 →

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What type of word is period?

As detailed above, 'period' can be an adjective, an interjection or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Interjection usage: When I say "eat your dinner," it means "eat your dinner," period!
  2. Noun usage: There was a period of confusion following the announcement.
  3. Noun usage: You'll be on probation for a six-month period.
  4. Noun usage: Food rationing continued in the post-war period.
  5. Noun usage: This is one of the last paintings Picasso created during his Blue Period.
  6. Noun usage: Gretzky scored in the last minute of the second period.
  7. Noun usage: I have math class in second period.
  8. Noun usage: When she is on her period she can be more disagreeable than usual

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