Word Type
Pile can be a verb or a noun.
pile used as a verb:
- To drive piles into; to fill with piles; to strengthen with piles.
- To lay or throw into a pile or heap; to heap up; to collect into a mass; to accumulate; to amass; — often with up; as, to pile up wood.
- To cover with heaps; or in great abundance; to fill or overfill; to load.
"We piled the camel with our loads." - To add something to a great number.
- (of vehicles) To create a hold-up.
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 →
pile used as a noun:
- A dart; an arrow.
- The head of an arrow or spear.
- A large stake, or piece of pointed timber, steel etc., driven into the earth or sea-bed for the support of a building, a pier, or other superstructure, or to form a cofferdam, etc.
- One of the ordinaries or subordinaries having the form of a wedge, usually placed palewise, with the broadest end uppermost.
- A hemorrhoid.
- A mass of things heaped together; a heap
"a pile of stones" - A mass formed in layers; as, a pile of shot.
- A funeral pile; a pyre.
- A large building, or mass of buildings.
- A bundle of pieces of wrought iron to be worked over into bars or other shapes by rolling or hammering at a welding heat; a fagot.
- A vertical series of alternate disks of two dissimilar metals, as copper and zinc, laid up with disks of cloth or paper moistened with acid water between them, for producing a current of electricity; — commonly called Volta's pile, voltaic pile, or galvanic pile.
- The reverse (or tails) of a coin.
- Hair, especially when very fine or short; the fine underfur of certain animals. (Formerly countable, now treated as a collective singular.)
- The raised hairs, loops or strands of a fabric; to nap of a cloth.
"Velvet soft, or plush with shaggy pile. — William Cowper"
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 pile?
- Verb usage: We piled the camel with our loads.
- Noun usage: a pile of stones
- Noun usage: a pile of wood.
- Noun usage: Velvet soft, or plush with shaggy pile. — William Cowper
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of pile 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 pile, 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).