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Serve can be a noun or a verb.

serve used as a noun:

  1. the act of putting the ball or shuttlecock in play in various games
    "Whose serve is it?"
  2. A portion of food, a serving

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 →

serve used as a verb:

  1. To work for; to labor in behalf of; to exert one's self continuously or statedly for the benefit of; to do service for; to be in the employment of, as an inferior, domestic, serf, slave, hired assistant, official helper, etc.
  2. To obey and worship.
  3. To be subordinate to; to act a secondary part under; to appear as the inferior of; to minister to.
  4. To be suitor to; to profess love to.
  5. To wait upon; to supply the wants of; to attend; specifically, to wait upon at table; to attend at meals; to supply with food
    "To serve customers in a shop."
  6. To bring forward, arrange, deal, or distribute, as a portion of anything, especially of food prepared for eating; -- often with serve up; formerly with serve in.
  7. To perform the duties belonging to, or required in or for; hence, to be of use to.
    "A curate may serve two churches"
  8. To contribute to or conduce to; to promote; to be sufficient for; to satisfy
    "to serve one's turn."
  9. To answer or be (in the place of something) to.
    "A sofa serves one for a seat and a couch."
  10. To treat; to behave one's self to; to requite; to act toward.
    "He served me very ill."
  11. To work; to operate.
    "to serve the guns."
  12. To bring to notice, deliver, or execute, either actually or constructively, in such manner as the law requires
    "to serve a summons."
  13. To make legal service upon (a person named in a writ, summons, etc.); as, to serve a witness with a subpoena.
  14. To pass or spend, as time, esp. time of punishment; as, to serve a term in prison.
  15. To copulate with; to verb.
    "A stallion serves a mare"
  16. To lead off with the first delivery (of the ball) over the net, as in tennis, volleyball, ping pong, etc.
  17. To wind spun yarn, or the like, tightly around (a rope or cable, etc.) so as to protect it from chafing or from the weather. See under Serving.
  18. To be a servant or a slave; to be employed in labor or other business for another; to be in subjection or bondage; to render menial service.
  19. To perform domestic offices; to be occupied with household affairs; to prepare and dish up food, etc.
  20. To be in service; to do duty; to discharge the requirements of an office or employment. Specifically, to act in the public service, as a soldier, seaman. etc.
  21. To be of use; to answer a purpose; to suffice; to suit; to be convenient or favorable.

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 serve?

As detailed above, 'serve' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: Whose serve is it?
  2. Verb usage: To serve customers in a shop.
  3. Verb usage: A curate may serve two churches
  4. Verb usage: to serve one's country.
  5. Verb usage: to serve one's turn.
  6. Verb usage: A sofa serves one for a seat and a couch.
  7. Verb usage: He served me very ill.
  8. Verb usage: to serve the guns.
  9. Verb usage: to serve a summons.
  10. Verb usage: A stallion serves a mare

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