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Rear can be an adjective, an adverb, a noun or a verb.

rear used as an adjective:

  1. Being behind, or in the hindmost part; hindmost; as, the rear rank of a company.

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 →

rear used as an adverb:

  1. early; soon
    "Then why does Cuddy leave his cot so rear! -- John Gay."

An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →

rear used as a noun:

  1. The back or hindmost part; that which is behind, or last on order; - opposed to front.
    "Nipped with the lagging rear of winter's frost. - Milton"
  2. Specifically, the part of an army or fleet which comes last, or is stationed behind the rest.
    "When the fierce foe hung on our broken rear. --Milton"
  3. The buttocks, a creature's bottom

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 →

rear used as a verb:

  1. To raise physically; to lift up; to cause to rise, to elevate.
    "In adoration at his feet I fell Submiss; he reared me. — Milton"
  2. To construct by building; to set up; as, to rear defenses or houses; to rear one government on the ruins of another.
    "One reared a font of stone. — Alfred Tennyson"
  3. To raise spiritually; to lift up; to elevate morally.
    "It reareth our hearts from vain thoughts. — Isaac Barrow"
  4. To lift and take up.
    "And having her from Trompart lightly reared, Upon his set the lovely load. — Edmund Spenser"
  5. To bring up to maturity, as offspring; to educate; to instruct; to foster.
    "He wants a father to protect his youth, and rear him up to virtue. — Thomas Southerne"
  6. To breed and raise; as, to rear cattle (cattle-rearing).
  7. To rouse; to strip up.
    "And seeks the tusky boar to rear. — John Dryden"
  8. To rise up on the hind legs, as a bolting horse.
  9. To sodomize

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 →

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What type of word is rear?

As detailed above, 'rear' can be an adjective, an adverb, a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adverb usage: Then why does Cuddy leave his cot so rear! -- John Gay.
  2. Noun usage: Nipped with the lagging rear of winter's frost. - Milton
  3. Noun usage: When the fierce foe hung on our broken rear. --Milton
  4. Verb usage: In adoration at his feet I fell Submiss; he reared me. — Milton
  5. Verb usage: Mine [shall be] the first hand to rear her banner. — Lord Lytton
  6. Verb usage: One reared a font of stone. — Alfred Tennyson
  7. Verb usage: It reareth our hearts from vain thoughts. — Isaac Barrow
  8. Verb usage: And having her from Trompart lightly reared, Upon his set the lovely load. — Edmund Spenser
  9. Verb usage: He wants a father to protect his youth, and rear him up to virtue. — Thomas Southerne
  10. Verb usage: And seeks the tusky boar to rear. — John Dryden

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