Word Type
Prime can be an adjective, a verb or a noun.
prime used as an adjective:
- First in time, order, or sequence
"Both the English and French governments established prime meridians in their capitals." - First in excellence, quality, or value.
"This is a prime location for a bookstore." - Having no integral factors except itself and unity (1 in the case of integers).
"Thirteen is a prime number." - Such that if it divides a product, it divides one of the mutiplicands.
- First in importance, degree, or rank.
"Our prime concern here is to keep the community safe." - Having its complement closed under multiplication: said only of ideals.
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 →
prime used as a verb:
- To prepare a mechanism for its main work.
"You'll have to press this button twice to prime the fuel pump." - To apply a coat of primer paint to.
"I need to prime these handrails before we can apply the finish coat."
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 →
prime used as a noun:
- One of the daily offices of prayer of the Western Church, associated with the early morning (typically 6 a.m.).
- The early morning.
- The earliest stage of something.
- the most active, thriving, or successful stage or period
- the chief or best individual or part
- The first note or tone of a musical scale.
- The first defensive position, with the sword hand held at head height, and the tip of the sword at head height.
- A prime element of a mathematical structure, particularly a prime number.
"3 is a prime." - A four-card hand containing one card of each suit in the game of Primero.
"The opposite of a “flush” in Poker." - Six consecutive blocks, which prevent the opponent's pieces from passing in backgammon.
"I'm threatening to build a prime here." - The symbol: ′
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 prime?
- Adjective usage: Both the English and French governments established prime meridians in their capitals.
- Adjective usage: This is a prime location for a bookstore.
- Adjective usage: Thirteen is a prime number.
- Adjective usage: Our prime concern here is to keep the community safe.
- Verb usage: You'll have to press this button twice to prime the fuel pump.
- Verb usage: I need to prime these handrails before we can apply the finish coat.
- Noun usage: 3 is a prime.
- Noun usage: The opposite of a “flush” in Poker.
- Noun usage: I'm threatening to build a prime here.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of prime 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 prime, 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).
