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popular is an adjective:

  1. Of or pertaining to the common people, or to the whole body of the people, as distinguished from a select portion; as, the popular voice; popular elections.
    "popular states - Francis Bacon"
  2. Suitable to common people; easy to be comprehended; not abstruse; familiar; plain.
    "Homilies are plain popular instructions. - Richard Hooker"
  3. Adapted to the means of the common people; possessed or obtainable by the many; hence, cheap; common; ordinary; inferior; as, popular prices; popular amusements.
    "The smallest figs, called popular figs, . . . are, of all others, the basest and of least account. - Holland?."
  4. Beloved or approved by the people; pleasing to people in general, or to many people; as, a popular preacher; a popular law; a popular administration.
  5. Devoted to the common people; studious of the favor of the populace.
    "Such popular humanity is treason. - Joseph Addison"
  6. Prevailing among the people; epidemic; as, a popular disease. - Samuel Johnson

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 →

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What type of word is popular?

As detailed above, 'popular' is an adjective. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adjective usage: popular states - Francis Bacon
  2. Adjective usage: So the popular vote inclines. - John Milton
  3. Adjective usage: The commonly held in popular estimation are greatest at a distance. - John Henry Newman
  4. Adjective usage: Homilies are plain popular instructions. - Richard Hooker
  5. Adjective usage: The smallest figs, called popular figs, . . . are, of all others, the basest and of least account. - Holland?.
  6. Adjective usage: Such popular humanity is treason. - Joseph Addison

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