WordType Logo

Word Type

Phrasing can be a noun or a verb.

phrasing used as a noun:

  1. The way a statement is put together, particularly in matters of style and word choice.
    "1870 But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner -- or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it -- would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=641224063&tag=Twain,+Mark,+1835-1910:+Life+on+the+Mississippi,+1870&query=phrasing&id=TwaLife Chapter 46.]"
  2. The way the musical phrases are put together in a composition or in its interpretation, with changes in tempo, volume, or emphasizing one or more instruments over others.
    "1891 The grand difficulty in the opening andante movement of Casta Diva lies in its broad, sustained phrasing, in the long, generous undulation of its rhythm, which with most singers drags or gets broken out of symmetry. Jenny Lind conceived and did it truly. Joel Benton, Life of Hon. Phineas T. Barnum, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=93153955&tag=Benton,+Joel:+Life+of+Hon.+Phineas+T.+Barnum,+1891&query=phrasing&id=BenLife Chapter 17.]"

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 →

phrasing used as a verb:

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 →

Related Searches

What type of word is phrasing?

As detailed above, 'phrasing' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: 1870 But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner -- or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it -- would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=641224063&tag=Twain,+Mark,+1835-1910:+Life+on+the+Mississippi,+1870&query=phrasing&id=TwaLife Chapter 46.]
  2. Noun usage: 1891 The grand difficulty in the opening andante movement of Casta Diva lies in its broad, sustained phrasing, in the long, generous undulation of its rhythm, which with most singers drags or gets broken out of symmetry. Jenny Lind conceived and did it truly. Joel Benton, Life of Hon. Phineas T. Barnum, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=93153955&tag=Benton,+Joel:+Life+of+Hon.+Phineas+T.+Barnum,+1891&query=phrasing&id=BenLife Chapter 17.]

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

Recent Queries