Word Type
Pygmy can be an adjective or a noun.
pygmy used as an adjective:
- Relating or belonging to the Pygmy people
"Most other children outgrow Pygmy adults well before puberty" - Like a pygmy; unusually short or small for its kind
"Soil exhaustion ultimately produces a pygmy crop at best"
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 →
pygmy used as a noun:
- (often capitalized, usually in the plural: Pygmies) A member of one of various Ancient Equatorial African tribal peoples, notable for their very short stature
"The Bantu immigration drove many Pygmy tribes into the darkest jungle, while other Pygmies were reduced to cohabitation in a subservient status" - A member of a race of dwarfs
"Homer and Herodote mentioned Pygmies in India (which would fit the Andamanese Negritoes) or Ethiopia (then meaning all Subsaharan Africa)" - Any dwarfish person
"Everyone looked like Pygmies whenever giant Joe joined his classmates" - An insignificant person, at least in some respect
"Despite his towering stature, the minister proved a political pygmy"
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 pygmy?
- Adjective usage: Most other children outgrow Pygmy adults well before puberty
- Adjective usage: Soil exhaustion ultimately produces a pygmy crop at best
- Noun usage: The Bantu immigration drove many Pygmy tribes into the darkest jungle, while other Pygmies were reduced to cohabitation in a subservient status
- Noun usage: Homer and Herodote mentioned Pygmies in India (which would fit the Andamanese Negritoes) or Ethiopia (then meaning all Subsaharan Africa)
- Noun usage: Everyone looked like Pygmies whenever giant Joe joined his classmates
- Noun usage: Despite his towering stature, the minister proved a political pygmy
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of pygmy 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 pygmy, 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).
