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Sex can be a noun or a phraseme.

sex used as a noun:

  1. Either of two main divisions (either female or male) into which many organisms can be placed, according to reproductive function or organs; gender.
    "What sex is that hamster?"
  2. The distinguishing property, quality, or assemblage of properties by which organisms are classified as female or male on the basis of their reproductive organs and functions; the set of properties by which male is distinguished from female.
    "The effect of the medication is dependent upon age, sex, and other factors."
  3. Sexual intercourse; the act of sexual intercourse.
    "All you ever think about is sex."
  4. Genitalia; a penis or vagina.
  5. the sex. Women; womankind. Also, the fair sex, the fairer sex, the whimsical sex.

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 →

sex used as a phraseme:

  1. To determine the biological sex of an animal.
    "It is not easy to sex lizards."
  2. To have sex with.
    "The passionate lovers sexed each other every night."

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What type of word is sex?

As detailed above, 'sex' can be a noun or a phraseme. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: What sex is that hamster?
  2. Noun usage: The abnormality is found in both sexes.
  3. Noun usage: The effect of the medication is dependent upon age, sex, and other factors.
  4. Noun usage: The researchers divided the subjects by sex.
  5. Noun usage: All you ever think about is sex.
  6. Noun usage: We had sex in the back seat.
  7. Phraseme usage: It is not easy to sex lizards.
  8. Phraseme usage: The passionate lovers sexed each other every night.
  9. Phraseme usage: OK, so I'm sexin' her, right, and all I can think of is this other girl.

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of sex 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 sex, and guess at its most common usage.

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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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