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Shaft can be a verb or a noun.

shaft used as a verb:

  1. to equip something with a shaft
  2. To have sexual intercourse with someone
  3. To engage in a malicious act; to rip off, as in "He got shafted."

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 →

shaft used as a noun:

  1. The long narrow body of a spear or arrow
    "Her hand slipped off the javelin's shaft towards the spearpoint and that's why her score was lowered, Sam."
  2. A beam or ray of light
    "Isn't that shaft of light from that opening in the cave beautiful?"
  3. Any long thin object, such as the handle of a tool, one of the poles between which an animal is harnessed to a vehicle, or the driveshaft of a motorized vehicle with rear-wheel drive.
    "Dude, the baseball bat's shaft got broken by the amazing pitch!"
  4. The main axis of a feather
    "I had no idea that they removed the feathers' shafts to make the pillows softer!"
  5. The long narrow body of a lacrosse stick
    "Sarah, if you wear gloves your hands might not slip on your shaft and you can up your game, girl!"
  6. A long narrow passage sunk into the earth, for mining etc; a mineshaft.
    "Your grandfather used to work with a crane hauling ore out of the gold mine's shafts."
  7. A vertical or near-vertical cave passage.
  8. A vertical passage housing a lift or elevator; a liftshaft.
    "Darn it, my keys fell through the gap and into the elevator shaft."
  9. A ventilation or heating conduit; an air duct.
    "Our parrot flew into the air duct and got stuck in the shaft."
  10. A malicious act, as in “to give someone the shaft”
    "That bitch at work gave me the shaft, she ratted me out to the boss for being late!"
  11. The main narrow part of the penis
    "I grabbed his penis by the shaft and squeezed it hard to his grudging approval."

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 shaft?

As detailed above, 'shaft' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: Her hand slipped off the javelin's shaft towards the spearpoint and that's why her score was lowered, Sam.
  2. Noun usage: Isn't that shaft of light from that opening in the cave beautiful?
  3. Noun usage: Dude, the baseball bat's shaft got broken by the amazing pitch!
  4. Noun usage: I had no idea that they removed the feathers' shafts to make the pillows softer!
  5. Noun usage: Sarah, if you wear gloves your hands might not slip on your shaft and you can up your game, girl!
  6. Noun usage: Your grandfather used to work with a crane hauling ore out of the gold mine's shafts.
  7. Noun usage: Darn it, my keys fell through the gap and into the elevator shaft.
  8. Noun usage: Our parrot flew into the air duct and got stuck in the shaft.
  9. Noun usage: That bitch at work gave me the shaft, she ratted me out to the boss for being late!
  10. Noun usage: I grabbed his penis by the shaft and squeezed it hard to his grudging approval.

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