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Radical can be an adjective or a noun.

radical used as an adjective:

  1. Favouring fundamental change, or change at the root cause of a matter.
    "His beliefs are radical."
  2. Of or pertaining to a root .
  3. Of or pertaining to the intrinsic nature of something.
  4. Thoroughgoing.
    "The spread of the cancer required radical surgery, and the entire organ was removed."
  5. Of or pertaining to the root of a word.
  6. Involving free radicals
  7. Excellent.
    "That was a radical jump!"

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 →

radical used as a noun:

  1. A member of the most progressive wing of the Liberal Party; someone favouring social reform (but generally stopping short of socialism).
  2. A member of an influential, centrist political party favouring moderate social reform, a republican constitution, and secular politics.
  3. A person with radical opinions.
  4. A root (of a number or quantity).
  5. In logographic writing systems as the Chinese writing system, the portion of a character (if any) that provides an indication of its meaning, as opposed to phonetic.
  6. In Semitic languages, any one of the set of consonants (typically three) that make up a root.
  7. A group of atoms, joined by covalent bonds, that take part in reactions as a single unit.
  8. A free radical.

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 →

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What type of word is radical?

As detailed above, 'radical' can be an adjective or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adjective usage: His beliefs are radical.
  2. Adjective usage: The spread of the cancer required radical surgery, and the entire organ was removed.
  3. Adjective usage: That was a radical jump!

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