Word Type
Short can be an adverb, a noun, a verb or an adjective.
short used as an adverb:
- abruptly
"They had to stop short to avoid hitting the dog in the street." - unawares
"The recent developments at work caught them short." - briefly
"The boss got a message and cut the meeting short." - curtly
"He cut me short repeatedly in the meeting." - without achieving a goal or requirement
"His speech fell short of what was expected." - of a cricket ball, to bounce relatively far from the batsman so that it bounces higher than normal; opposite of full
- With a negative ownership position.
"We went short most finance companies in July."
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
short used as a noun:
- A short circuit.
- shortstop
"Jones smashes a grounder between third and short." - A short seller
"The market decline was terrible, but the shorts were buying champagne." - A short sale
"He closed out his short at a modest loss after three months."
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 →
short used as a verb:
- To cause a short circuit in (something).
- Of an electrical circuit, to short circuit.
- To shortchange.
- To provide with a smaller than agreed or labeled amount.
"This is the third time I've caught them shorting us." - To sell something, especially securities, that one does not own at the moment for delivery at a later date in hopes of profiting from a decline in the price; to sell short.
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 →
short used as an adjective:
- Having a small distance from one end or edge to another, either horizontally or vertically.
- Of comparatively little height.
- Having little duration; opposite of long.
- Of a word or phrase, constituting an abbreviation (for another) or shortened form (of another).
- that bounced relatively far from the batsman
- relatively close to the batsman
- brittle (of pastry); see also shortening, shortcrust
- missing, deficient
- Any financial investment position that is structured to be profitable if the price of the underlying security declines in the future.
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is short?
- Adverb usage: They had to stop short to avoid hitting the dog in the street.
- Adverb usage: The recent developments at work caught them short.
- Adverb usage: The boss got a message and cut the meeting short.
- Adverb usage: He cut me short repeatedly in the meeting.
- Adverb usage: His speech fell short of what was expected.
- Adverb usage: We went short most finance companies in July.
- Noun usage: Jones smashes a grounder between third and short.
- Noun usage: The market decline was terrible, but the shorts were buying champagne.
- Noun usage: He closed out his short at a modest loss after three months.
- Verb usage: This is the third time I've caught them shorting us.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of short 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 short, 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).
