Word Type
run down is a verb:
- To hit someone with a car or other vehicle and injure or kill them.
"He was run down while crossing the main road." - To criticize someone or an organisation, often unfairly.
"Whatever the company says, the media is going to run them down." - To find something or someone after searching for a long time.
"I finally managed to run down that report. I had filed it incorrectly." - To lose power slowly. Used for a machine, battery, or other powered device.
"You need to wind up the clock every day so that it doesn't run down." - To read quickly a list or other short text.
"Running down the list of suggestions, I can see three we can discard immediately." - To reduce the size or stock levels of a business, often with a view to closure.
"The board of directors have decided to run down the stocks held in storage prior to offering the company for sale."
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 run down?
- Verb usage: He was run down while crossing the main road.
- Verb usage: Whatever the company says, the media is going to run them down.
- Verb usage: My sister is always running me down in front of my friends.
- Verb usage: Don't run yourself down so much!
- Verb usage: I finally managed to run down that report. I had filed it incorrectly.
- Verb usage: You need to wind up the clock every day so that it doesn't run down.
- Verb usage: If you don't switch off the car lights, you will run the battery down.
- Verb usage: Running down the list of suggestions, I can see three we can discard immediately.
- Verb usage: The board of directors have decided to run down the stocks held in storage prior to offering the company for sale.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of run down 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 run down, 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).