Word Type
proper is an adjective:
- Suited or acceptable to the purpose or circumstances; fit, suitable.
"The proper time to plant potatoes." - Following the established standards of behavior or manners; correct or decorous.
"A very proper young lady." - Fitting; right.
"It is only proper to bring food to a potluck." - Exact; precise.
- In the very strictest sense of the word.
"According to the Supreme Court, tomatoes do not belong to the fruits proper." - Used to designate a particular person, place, or thing. Proper words are usually written with an initial capital letter.
- Common or ordinary.
- Belonging to oneself or itself; own.
"He was restored to his proper color after taking the elixir." - Complete or thorough.
"I gave that cream a proper whipping." - Entitled to its name; true.
"I wanted a proper breakfast, not just a morning snack." - Having its natural or usual coloration, though this is often according to what heraldic convention defines as the natural or usual; proper is considered to be its own tincture.
- utter
"When I realized I was wearing my shirt inside out, I felt a proper fool." - nontrivial
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 proper?
- Adjective usage: The proper time to plant potatoes.
- Adjective usage: A very proper young lady.
- Adjective usage: It is only proper to bring food to a potluck.
- Adjective usage: According to the Supreme Court, tomatoes do not belong to the fruits proper.
- Adjective usage: The school is located in the town proper.
- Adjective usage: He was restored to his proper color after taking the elixir.
- Adjective usage: I gave that cream a proper whipping.
- Adjective usage: I wanted a proper breakfast, not just a morning snack.
- Adjective usage: When I realized I was wearing my shirt inside out, I felt a proper fool.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of proper 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 proper, 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).
