Word Type
Sign can be a verb or a noun.
sign used as a verb:
- To write one's signature on (a document), thus showing authorship.
"I forgot to sign that letter to my aunt." - To give legal consent by writing one's signature.
"I'm not signing anything without my lawyer present." - To persuade to sign a contract.
"It was a great month. I managed to sign three major players." - To write one's signature somewhere.
"Please sign on the dotted line." - To give autographs.
"I'm sorry, I don't sign." - To communicate using sign language.
"I'm learning to sign so I can talk to my new neighbor."
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 →
sign used as a noun:
- A visible indication.
"Their angry expressions were a clear sign they didn't want to talk." - A clearly visible object, generally flat, bearing a short message in words or pictures.
"The sign in the window said "for rent"." - A traffic sign.
"I missed the sign at the corner so I took the wrong turn." - A meaningful gesture.
"I gave them a thumbs-up sign." - Any of several specialized non-alphabetic symbols.
"The sharp sign indicates that the pitch of the note is raised a half step." - An astrological sign.
"Your sign is Taurus? That's no surprise." - Positive or negative polarity.
"I got the magnitude right, but the sign was wrong." - A linguistic unit in sign language equivalent to word in spoken languages.
"What's the sign for "computer"?" - sign language in general
"Sorry, I don't know sign very well." - An omen.
""It's a sign of the end of the world," the doom prophet said." - A property of the body that indicates a disease and, unlike a symptom, is unlikely to be noticed by the patient.
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is sign?
- Verb usage: I forgot to sign that letter to my aunt.
- Verb usage: I'm not signing anything without my lawyer present.
- Verb usage: It was a great month. I managed to sign three major players.
- Verb usage: Please sign on the dotted line.
- Verb usage: I'm sorry, I don't sign.
- Verb usage: I'm learning to sign so I can talk to my new neighbor.
- Noun usage: Their angry expressions were a clear sign they didn't want to talk.
- Noun usage: Those clouds show signs of raining soon.
- Noun usage: Those clouds show little sign of raining soon.
- Noun usage: The sign in the window said "for rent".
- Noun usage: I missed the sign at the corner so I took the wrong turn.
- Noun usage: I gave them a thumbs-up sign.
- Noun usage: The sharp sign indicates that the pitch of the note is raised a half step.
- Noun usage: Your sign is Taurus? That's no surprise.
- Noun usage: I got the magnitude right, but the sign was wrong.
- Noun usage: What's the sign for "computer"?
- Noun usage: Sorry, I don't know sign very well.
- Noun usage: "It's a sign of the end of the world," the doom prophet said.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of sign 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 sign, 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).
