Word Type
Race can be a verb or a noun.
race used as a verb:
- To take part in a race (in the sense of a contest).
- To move or drive at high speed.
"As soon as it was time to go home, he raced for the door." - Of a motor, to run rapidly when not engaged to a transmission.
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 →
race used as a noun:
- A large group of people distinguished from others on the basis of a common heritage.
"The Anglo-Saxon race" - A large group of people distinguished from others on the basis of common, genetically linked, physical characteristics, such as skin color or hair type.
"Race was a significant issue during apartheid in South Africa." - One of the categories from the many subcategorizations of the human species. See Wikipedia's article on historical definitions of race.
"The Native Americans colonized the New World in several waves from Asia, and thus they are part of the same Mongoloid race." - A population geographically separated from others of its species that develops significantly different characteristics; informal for subspecies.
- A breed or strain of domesticated animal.
- A category or species of something that has emerged or evolved from an older one (with an implied parallel to animal breeding or evolutionary science).
"The advent of the Internet has brought about a new race of entrepreneur." - A contest between people, animals, vehicles, etc. where the goal is to be the first to reach some objective. Several horses run in a horse race, and the first one to reach the finishing post wins; in an arms race several countries each try to acquire more powerful weapons than any other.
- A progressive movement toward a goal.
- A fast moving current of water.
- Travels, runs, or journeys.
- A rhizome, especially of ginger.
- The bushings of a rolling element bearing which contacts the rolling elements.
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 race?
- Verb usage: As soon as it was time to go home, he raced for the door.
- Verb usage: Her heart was racing as she peered into the dimly lit room.
- Noun usage: The Anglo-Saxon race
- Noun usage: Race was a significant issue during apartheid in South Africa.
- Noun usage: The Native Americans colonized the New World in several waves from Asia, and thus they are part of the same Mongoloid race.
- Noun usage: The advent of the Internet has brought about a new race of entrepreneur.
- Noun usage: Recent developments in artificial intelligence has brought about a new race of robots that can perform household chores without supervision.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of race 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 race, 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).