Word Type
Shotgun can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.
shotgun used as a noun:
- A gun which fires loads consisting of small metal balls, called shot, from a cartridge.
- The front passenger seat in a vehicle, next to the driver.
"I call shotgun! (I claim the right to sit in the passenger seat.)" - A one-story dwelling with no hallways or corridors, with the rooms arranged in a straight line. Mostly heard in the southern United States.
"Elvis Presley was born in a two-bedroom shotgun in Tupelo, Mississippi." - A play formation in which the quarterback is a few feet behind the snapper when the ball is hiked, ideally allowing for an easier pass play.
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 →
shotgun used as an adjective:
- Of or relating to a shotgun.
"The ground was littered with shotgun shells." - Occurring as a result of the threat of force.
"a shotgun wedding" - Utilizing numerous or highly diverse means to achieve a particular result.
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 →
shotgun used as a verb:
- To inhale from a pipe or other smoking device, followed shortly by an exhalation into someone else’s mouth.
- To verbally lay claim to (something)
"I got a day off because I shotgunned it." - To hit the ball directly back at the pitcher.
- To rapidly drink a beverage from a can by making a hole in the bottom of the can, placing the hole above one's mouth, and opening the top.
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is shotgun?
- Noun usage: I call shotgun! (I claim the right to sit in the passenger seat.)
- Noun usage: Elvis Presley was born in a two-bedroom shotgun in Tupelo, Mississippi.
- Adjective usage: The ground was littered with shotgun shells.
- Adjective usage: a shotgun wedding
- Verb usage: I got a day off because I shotgunned it.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of shotgun 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 shotgun, 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).