Word Type
Railroad can be a noun or a verb.
railroad used as a noun:
- A permanent road consisting of fixed metal rails to drive trains or similar motorized vehicles on.
"Many railroads roughly follow the trace of older land - and/or water roads" - The transportation system comprising such roads and vehicles fitted to travel on the rails, usually with several vehicles connected together in a train.
- A single, privately or publicly owned property comprising one or more such roads and usually associated assets
"Railroads can only compete fully if their tracks are techically compatible with and linked to each-other" - A procedure conducted or bullied in haste without due consideration.
"The lawyers made the procedure a railroad to get the signatures they needed."
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 →
railroad used as a verb:
- To transport via railroad.
- To operate a railroad.
"The Thatcherite experiment proved the private sector can railroad as inefficiently as a state monopoly" - To work for a railroad.
- To engage in a hobby pertaining to railroads.
- To manipulate and hasten a procedure, as of formal approval of a law or resolution.
"The majority railroaded the bill through parliament, without the customary expert studies which would delay it till after the elections." - To convict of a crime by circumventing due process.
"They could only convict him by railroading him on suspect drug-possession charges." - To procedurally bully someone into an unfair agreement.
"He was railroaded into signing a non-disclosure agreement at his exit interview."
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is railroad?
- Noun usage: Many railroads roughly follow the trace of older land - and/or water roads
- Noun usage: Railroads can only compete fully if their tracks are techically compatible with and linked to each-other
- Noun usage: The lawyers made the procedure a railroad to get the signatures they needed.
- Verb usage: The Thatcherite experiment proved the private sector can railroad as inefficiently as a state monopoly
- Verb usage: The majority railroaded the bill through parliament, without the customary expert studies which would delay it till after the elections.
- Verb usage: They could only convict him by railroading him on suspect drug-possession charges.
- Verb usage: He was railroaded into signing a non-disclosure agreement at his exit interview.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of railroad 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 railroad, 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).
