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Reach can be a verb or a noun.

reach used as a verb:

  1. To extend; to stretch; to thrust out; to put forth, as a limb, a member, something held, or the like.
    "He reached for a weapon that was on the table."
  2. Hence, to deliver by stretching out a member, especially the hand; to give with the hand; to pass to another; to hand over; as, to reach one a book.
  3. To attain or obtain by stretching forth the hand; too extend some part of the body, or something held by one, so as to touch, strike, grasp, or the like; as, to reach an object with the hand, or with a spear.
    "The gun was stored in a small box on a high closet shelf, but the boy managed to reach it by climbing on other boxes."
  4. To strike, hit, or tough with a missile; as, to reach an object with an arrow, a bullet, or a shell.
  5. Hence, to extend an action, effort, or influence to; to penetrate to; to pierce, or cut, as far as.
  6. To extend to; to stretch out as far as; to touch by virtue of extent; as, his hand reaches the river.
  7. To arrive at by effort of any kind; to attain to; to gain; to be advanced to.
    "In 3 years, he reached the position of manager."
  8. To understand; to comprehend.
    "I didn't reach what he was trying to tell me."
  9. To stretch out the hand.
  10. To strain after something; to make efforts.
    "Reach for your dreams."
  11. To extend in dimension, time, amount, action, influence, etc., so as to touch, attain to, or be equal to, something.

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 →

reach used as a noun:

  1. The act of stretching or extending; extension; power of reaching or touching with the person, or a limb, or something held or thrown.
    "The fruit is beyond my reach."
  2. The power of stretching out or extending action, influence, or the like; power of attainment or management; extent of force or capacity.
  3. Extent; stretch; expanse; hence, application; influence; result; scope.
  4. An exaggeration; an extension beyond evidence or normal; a stretch.
    "To call George eloquent is certainly a reach."
  5. The distance a boxer's arm can extend to land a blow.
  6. An extended portion of land or water; a stretch; a straight portion of a stream or river, as from one turn to another; a level stretch, as between locks in a canal; an arm of the sea extending up into the land.
  7. Any point of sail in which the wind comes from the side of a vessel.

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 reach?

As detailed above, 'reach' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: He reached for a weapon that was on the table.
  2. Verb usage: He reached for his shoe with his legs.
  3. Verb usage: The gun was stored in a small box on a high closet shelf, but the boy managed to reach it by climbing on other boxes.
  4. Verb usage: I can't quite reach the pepper, could you pass it to me?
  5. Verb usage: In 3 years, he reached the position of manager.
  6. Verb usage: I didn't reach what he was trying to tell me.
  7. Verb usage: Reach for your dreams.
  8. Noun usage: The fruit is beyond my reach.
  9. Noun usage: to be within reach of cannon shot
  10. Noun usage: To call George eloquent is certainly a reach.

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