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Sharp can be an adverb, a verb, a noun or an adjective.

sharp used as an adverb:

  1. Exactly.
    "I'll see you at twelve o'clock sharp."
  2. In a higher pitch than is correct or desirable.
    "I didn't enjoy the concert much because the tenor kept going sharp on the high notes."

An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →

sharp used as a verb:

  1. To raise the pitch of a note half a step making a natural note a sharp.
    "That new musician must be tone deaf: he sharped half the notes of the song!"

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 →

sharp used as a noun:

  1. The symbol ♯, placed after the name of a note in the key signature or before a note on the staff to indicate that the note is to be played a semitone higher.
  2. A note that is played a semitone higher than usual; denoted by the name of the note that is followed by the symbol ♯.
  3. A note that is sharp in a particular key.
  4. The scale having a particular sharp note as its tonic.
  5. Something which is sharp; usually used in the plural.
  6. A hypodermic needle.
  7. A scalpel or other edged instrument used in surgery.
  8. A dishonest person; a cheater.
    "The casino kept in the break room a set of pictures of known sharps for the bouncers to see."

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 →

sharp used as an adjective:

  1. Able to cut easily.
    "I keep my knives sharp so that they don't slip unexpectedly while carving."
  2. Intelligent.
    "My nephew is a sharp lad; he can count to 100 in six languages, and he's only five years old."
  3. Able to pierce easily; pointed.
    "Ernest made the pencil too sharp and accidentally stabbed himself with it."
  4. Higher than usual by one semitone (denoted by the name of the note followed by the symbol ♯).
  5. Higher in pitch than required.
  6. Having an intense, acrid flavour.
  7. Something sudden and intense.
    "1860 Thoreau, Henry David, journal entry, July 9, 1860. From Thoreau on Birds: notes on New England birds from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau, Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p239. (Originally published as Thoreau's bird-lore, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910, edited by Francis H. Allen.)"
  8. Illegal or dishonest.
  9. Exact, precise, accurate; keen.
    "You'll need sharp aim to make that shot."
  10. Offensive, critical, or acrimonious, as sharp criticism.
    "When the two rivals met, first there were sharp words, and then a fight broke out."
  11. Stylish or attractive.
    "You look so sharp in that tuxedo!"
  12. Observant; alert; acute.
    "Keep a sharp watch on the prisoners. I don't want them to escape!"

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 →

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What type of word is sharp?

As detailed above, 'sharp' can be an adverb, a verb, a noun or an adjective. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adverb usage: I'll see you at twelve o'clock sharp.
  2. Adverb usage: I didn't enjoy the concert much because the tenor kept going sharp on the high notes.
  3. Verb usage: That new musician must be tone deaf: he sharped half the notes of the song!
  4. Noun usage: The casino kept in the break room a set of pictures of known sharps for the bouncers to see.
  5. Adjective usage: I keep my knives sharp so that they don't slip unexpectedly while carving.
  6. Adjective usage: My nephew is a sharp lad; he can count to 100 in six languages, and he's only five years old.
  7. Adjective usage: Ernest made the pencil too sharp and accidentally stabbed himself with it.
  8. Adjective usage: 1860 Thoreau, Henry David, journal entry, July 9, 1860. From Thoreau on Birds: notes on New England birds from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau, Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p239. (Originally published as Thoreau's bird-lore, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910, edited by Francis H. Allen.)
  9. Adjective usage: There is a smart shower at 5 P.M., and in the midst of it a hummingbird is busy about the flowers in the garden, unmindful of it, though you would think that each drop that struck him would be a serious accident.
  10. Adjective usage: You'll need sharp aim to make that shot.
  11. Adjective usage: When the two rivals met, first there were sharp words, and then a fight broke out.
  12. Adjective usage: You look so sharp in that tuxedo!
  13. Adjective usage: Keep a sharp watch on the prisoners. I don't want them to escape!

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