Word Type
Positive can be a noun or an adjective.
positive used as a noun:
- A thing capable of being affirmed; something real or actual.
- A favourable point or characteristic.
- Something having a positive value in physics, such as an electric charge.
- An adjective or adverb in the positive degree.
- A positive image; one that displays true colors and shades, as opposed to a negative.
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 →
positive used as an adjective:
- Definitively laid down; explicitly stated; clearly expressed, precise, emphatic.
- Fully assured, confident; certain.
"I’m absolutely positive you've spelt that wrong." - Overconfident, dogmatic.
- Describing the primary sense of an adjective or adverb; not comparative or superlative.
"‘Better’ is an irregular comparative of the positive form ‘good’." - Derived from an object by itself; not dependent on changing circumstances or relations; absolute.
"The idea of beauty is not positive, but depends on the different tastes of individuals." - Wholly what is expressed; colloquially downright, entire, outright.
"Good lord, you've built up a positive arsenal of weaponry here." - Characterized by the existence or presence of qualities or features, rather than by their absence.
"The box was not empty – I felt some positive substance within it." - Characterized by the presence of features which support a hypothesis.
"The results of our experiment are positive." - Characterized by affirmation, constructiveness, or influence for the better; favourable.
"He has a positive outlook on life." - Actual, real, concrete.
- Of a visual image, true to the original in light, shade and colour values.
"A positive photograph can be developed from a photographic negative." - Having more protons than electrons.
"A cation is a positive ion as it has more protons than electrons." - Of number, greater than zero.
- HIV positive.
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is positive?
- Adjective usage: I’m absolutely positive you've spelt that wrong.
- Adjective usage: ‘Better’ is an irregular comparative of the positive form ‘good’.
- Adjective usage: The idea of beauty is not positive, but depends on the different tastes of individuals.
- Adjective usage: Good lord, you've built up a positive arsenal of weaponry here.
- Adjective usage: The box was not empty – I felt some positive substance within it.
- Adjective usage: The results of our experiment are positive.
- Adjective usage: He has a positive outlook on life.
- Adjective usage: The first-night reviews were largely positive.
- Adjective usage: A positive photograph can be developed from a photographic negative.
- Adjective usage: A cation is a positive ion as it has more protons than electrons.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of positive 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 positive, 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).
