Word Type
Reason can be a verb or a noun.
reason used as a verb:
- To exercise the rational faculty; to deduce inferences from premises; to perform the process of deduction or of induction; to ratiocinate; to reach conclusions by a systematic comparison of facts.
- Hence: To carry on a process of deduction or of induction, in order to convince or to confute; to formulate and set forth propositions and the inferences from them; to argue.
- To converse; to compare opinions.
- To arrange and present the reasons for or against; to examine or discuss by arguments; to debate or discuss.
"I reasoned the matter with my friend." - To support with reasons, as a request.
- To persuade by reasoning or argument.
"to reason one into a belief; to reason one out of his plan" - To overcome or conquer by adducing reasons; — with down.
"to reason down a passion" - To find by logical process; to explain or justify by reason or argument; — usually with out.
"to reason out the causes of the librations of the moon"
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 →
reason used as a noun:
- A cause:
- # That which causes something: an efficient cause, a proximate cause.
- #: The reason this tree fell is that it had rotted.
- #* 1996, Daniel Clement Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, page 198,
- #*: There is a reason why so many should be symmetrical: The selective advantage in a symmetrical complex is enjoyed by all the subunits
- # A motive for an action or a determination.
- #: The reason I robbed the bank was that I needed the money.
- #* 1806, [Anonymous], Select Notes to Book XXI, in, Alexander Pope, translator, The Odyssey of Homer, volume 6, London, F.J. du Roveray, page 37,
- #*: This is the reason why he proposes to offer a libation, to atone for the abuse of the day by their diversions.
- #* 1881, Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, chapter 10,
- #*: Ralph Touchett, for reasons best known to himself, had seen fit to say that Gilbert Osmond was not a good fellow.
- # An excuse: a thought or a consideration offered in support of a determination or an opinion; that which is offered or accepted as an explanation.
- #* 1966, Graham Greene, The Comedians, Penguin Classics edition, ISBN 0140184945, page 14,
- #*: I have forgotten the reason he gave for not travelling by air. I felt sure that it was not the correct reason, and that he suffered from a heart trouble which he kept to himself.
- # proof, more or less decisive, for an opinion or a conclusion
- The cognitive faculties, collectively, of conception, judgment, reasoning, and intuition; the ability to think.
"Mankind should develop reason above all other virtues." - Something reasonable, in accordance with thought; justice.
"I was promised, on a time, To have reason for my rhyme. —Edmund Spenser" - due exercise of the reasoning faculty
- ratio; proportion.
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 reason?
- Verb usage: I reasoned the matter with my friend.
- Verb usage: to reason one into a belief; to reason one out of his plan
- Verb usage: to reason down a passion
- Verb usage: to reason out the causes of the librations of the moon
- Noun usage: Mankind should develop reason above all other virtues.
- Noun usage: I was promised, on a time, To have reason for my rhyme. —Edmund Spenser
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of reason 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 reason, 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).
