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Press can be a noun or a verb.

press used as a noun:

  1. A device used to apply pressure to an item.
    "...a flower press."
  2. A collective term for the print based media (both the people and the newspapers)
    "This article appeared in the press."
  3. An enclosed storage space (eg closet, cupboard).
    "Put the cups in the press."
  4. A printing machine.
    "Stop the presses!"
  5. An exercise in which weight is forced away from the body by extension of the arms or legs.

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 →

press used as a verb:

  1. to exert weight or force against, to act upon with with force or weight
  2. to compress, squeeze
    "to press fruit for the purpose of extracting the juice"
  3. to clasp, hold in an embrace; to hug
    "She took her son, and press'd"
  4. to reduce to a particular shape or form by pressure, especially flatten or smooth
    "to press cloth with an iron"
  5. To flatten a selected area of fabric using an iron with an up-and-down, not sliding, motion, so as to avoid disturbing adjacent areas.
  6. to drive or thrust by pressure, to force in a certain direction
    "to press a crowd back"
  7. to weigh upon, oppress, trouble
    "He turns from us;"
  8. to force to a certain end or result; to urge strongly, impel
    "The two gentlemen who conducted me to the island were pressed by their private affairs to return in three days. (Swift, Gulliver's Travels, III. 8)"
  9. to hasten, urge onward
  10. to urge, beseech, entreat
    "God heard their prayers, wherein they earnestly pressed him for the honor of his great name. (Winthrop, Hist. New England, II. 35)"
  11. to lay stress upon, emphasize
    "If we read but a very little, we naturally want to press it all; if we read a great deal, we are willing not to press the whole of what we read, and we learn what ought to be pressed and what not. (M. Arnold, Literature and Dogma, Pref.)"
  12. to throng, crowd
  13. to print

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 →

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What type of word is press?

As detailed above, 'press' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: ...a flower press.
  2. Noun usage: This article appeared in the press.
  3. Noun usage: ...according to a member of the press...
  4. Noun usage: Put the cups in the press.
  5. Noun usage: Stop the presses!
  6. Verb usage: to press fruit for the purpose of extracting the juice
  7. Verb usage: She took her son, and press'd
  8. Verb usage: The illustrious infant to her fragrant breast (Dryden, Illiad, VI. 178.)
  9. Verb usage: to press cloth with an iron
  10. Verb usage: to press a hat
  11. Verb usage: to press a crowd back
  12. Verb usage: He turns from us;
  13. Verb usage: Alas, he weeps too! Something presses him
  14. Verb usage: He would reveal, but dare not.-Sir, be comforted. (Fletcher, Pilgrim, I. 2.)
  15. Verb usage: The two gentlemen who conducted me to the island were pressed by their private affairs to return in three days. (Swift, Gulliver's Travels, III. 8)
  16. Verb usage: God heard their prayers, wherein they earnestly pressed him for the honor of his great name. (Winthrop, Hist. New England, II. 35)
  17. Verb usage: If we read but a very little, we naturally want to press it all; if we read a great deal, we are willing not to press the whole of what we read, and we learn what ought to be pressed and what not. (M. Arnold, Literature and Dogma, Pref.)

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