Word Type
Pick up can be a noun or a verb.
pick up used as a noun:
- An impromptu athletic game.
"Rather than join a basketball league, James decided to play pick up." - The act of picking up something or someone.
- An instance of approaching someone and engaging in romantic flirtation and courting with the intent to pursue romance, a date, or a sexual encounter. See also pick-up line, pick-up joint, pickup artist.
"Hey, thanks for the drink, but if this is a pick up, I'm not interested." - A pickup truck.
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 →
pick up used as a verb:
- To lift; to grasp and raise.
"When you pick up the bag, make sure to support the bottom." - To collect an object, especially in passing.
"Can you pick up a pint of milk on your way home?" - To clean up; to return to an organized state.
"Aren't you going to pick up after yourself?" - To collect a passenger.
"I'll pick you up outside the library." - To collect and detain (a suspect).
"The cops have picked up the man they were looking for." - To improve, increase, or speed up.
"Prices seem to be picking up again." - To restart or resume.
"Let's pick up where we left off yesterday." - To learn, to grasp; to begin to understand.
"It looks complicated, but you'll soon pick it up." - (of a radio signal, etc.) To receive.
"With the new antenna, I can pick up stations all the way from Omaha." - To notice, detect or discern, often used with "on".
"Did you pick up his nervousness?" - To point out (a person's behaviour, habits or actions) in a critical manner.
"She's always picking me up on my grammar" - To meet and seduce somebody for romantic purposes, especially in a social situation, sometimes used with "on".
"He was in the fabric store not to buy fabric but to pick up women." - To answer a telephone. See pick up the phone.
"I'm calling him, but he just isn't picking up!" - To pay for.
"The company will pick up lunch with customers for sales calls."
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 pick up?
- Noun usage: Rather than join a basketball league, James decided to play pick up.
- Noun usage: At lunch we had a game of pick up hockey.
- Noun usage: Hey, thanks for the drink, but if this is a pick up, I'm not interested.
- Verb usage: When you pick up the bag, make sure to support the bottom.
- Verb usage: Can you pick up a pint of milk on your way home?
- Verb usage: Aren't you going to pick up after yourself?
- Verb usage: I'll pick you up outside the library.
- Verb usage: The cops have picked up the man they were looking for.
- Verb usage: Prices seem to be picking up again.
- Verb usage: Let's pick up where we left off yesterday.
- Verb usage: It looks complicated, but you'll soon pick it up.
- Verb usage: With the new antenna, I can pick up stations all the way from Omaha.
- Verb usage: Did you pick up his nervousness?
- Verb usage: Did you pick up on his nervousness?
- Verb usage: She's always picking me up on my grammar
- Verb usage: He was in the fabric store not to buy fabric but to pick up women.
- Verb usage: She could tell he intended to pick up on her.
- Verb usage: I'm calling him, but he just isn't picking up!
- Verb usage: The company will pick up lunch with customers for sales calls.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of pick up 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 pick up, 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).
