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Seed can be an adjective, a verb or a noun.

seed used as an adjective:

  1. Held in reserve for future growth.
    "seed money"
  2. First. The initial state, condition or position of a changing, growing or developing process; the ultimate precursor in a defined chain of precursors.
    "What was the seed number that initiated the sequence of values?"
  3. A precursor, especially in a process without a defined initial state.
    "What was the seed idea behind your scheme?"

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 →

seed used as a verb:

  1. To plant or sow an area with seeds.
    "I seeded my lawn with bluegrass."
  2. To start; to provide, assign or determine the initial resources for, position of, state of.
    "A venture captialist seeds young companies."
  3. To be able to compete (especially in a quarter-final/semi-final/final).
    "The tennis player seeded into the quarters."

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 →

seed used as a noun:

  1. A fertilized grain, initially encased in a fruit, which may grow into a mature plant.
    "If you plant a seed in the spring, you may have a pleasant surprise in the autumn."
  2. A fertilized ovule, containing an embryonic plant.
  3. An amount of fertilized grain that cannot be readily counted.
    "The entire field was covered with geese eating the freshly sown seed."
  4. Semen.
    "Sometimes a man may feel encouraged to spread his seed before he settles down to raise a family."
  5. A precursor.
    "The seed of an idea. Which idea was the seed (idea)?"
  6. The initial state, condition or position of a changing, growing or developing process; the ultimate precusor in a defined chain of precusors.
  7. # The initial position of a competitor or team in a tournament. (seed position)
  8. #: The team with the best regular season record receives the top seed in the conference tournament.
  9. # The competitor or team occupying a given seed. (seed position)
  10. #: The rookie was a surprising top seed.
  11. # Initialization state of a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG). (seed number)
  12. #: If you use the same seed you will get exactly the same pattern of numbers.
  13. # Commercial message in a creative format placed on relevant sites on the Internet. (seed idea or seed message)
  14. #: The latest seed has attracted a lot of users in our online community.

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 seed?

As detailed above, 'seed' can be an adjective, a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adjective usage: seed money
  2. Adjective usage: Don’t eat your seed corn
  3. Adjective usage: What was the seed number that initiated the sequence of values?
  4. Adjective usage: The qualifying match determines the seed position one will have in the final competition.
  5. Adjective usage: What was the seed idea behind your scheme?
  6. Adjective usage: Use your profits as seed money for your next venture.
  7. Verb usage: I seeded my lawn with bluegrass.
  8. Verb usage: A venture captialist seeds young companies.
  9. Verb usage: The tournament coordinator will seed the starting lineup with the best competitors from the qualifying round.
  10. Verb usage: The programmer seeded fresh, uncorrupted data into the database before running unit tests.
  11. Verb usage: The tennis player seeded into the quarters.
  12. Noun usage: If you plant a seed in the spring, you may have a pleasant surprise in the autumn.
  13. Noun usage: The entire field was covered with geese eating the freshly sown seed.
  14. Noun usage: Sometimes a man may feel encouraged to spread his seed before he settles down to raise a family.
  15. Noun usage: The seed of an idea. Which idea was the seed (idea)?

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