Word Type
Silent can be an adjective or a noun.
silent used as an adjective:
- Free from sound or noise; absolutely still; perfectly quiet.
- Not speaking; indisposed to talk; speechless; mute; taciturn; not loquacious; not talkative.
"Ulysses, adds he, was the most eloquent and most silent of men. Broome." - Keeping at rest; inactive; calm; undisturbed; as, the wind is silent. Parnell. Sir W. Raleigh.
- (pronunciation) Not pronounced; having no sound; quiescent; as, "e is silent in fable."
- Having no effect; not operating; inefficient.
- Without audio capability.
"The Magnavox Odyssey was a silent console."
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 →
silent used as a noun:
- That which is silent; a time of silence.
"The silent of the night. Shakespeare" - A silent movie
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 silent?
- Adjective usage: Ulysses, adds he, was the most eloquent and most silent of men. Broome.
- Adjective usage: This new-created world, whereof in hell Fame is not silent. John Milton.
- Adjective usage: The Magnavox Odyssey was a silent console.
- Noun usage: The silent of the night. Shakespeare
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of silent 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 silent, 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).
