Word Type
Single can be a noun, a verb or an adjective.
single used as a noun:
- A 45rpm vinyl record with one song on side A and one on side B.
- A popular song released and sold (on any format) nominally on its own though usually has at least one extra track.
- One who is not married.
"He went to the party, hoping to meet some friendly singles there." - A score of one run.
- A hit in baseball where the batter advances to first base.
- A bill valued at $1.
"I don't have any singles, so you'll have to make change." - A one-way ticket.
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 →
single used as a verb:
- To identify or select one member of a group from the others; generally used with out, either to single out or to single (something) out.
"Eddie singled out his favorite marble from the bag." - To get a hit that advances the batter exactly one base.
"Pedro singled in the bottom of the eighth inning, which, if converted to a run, would put the team back into contention."
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 →
single used as an adjective:
- Not accompanied by anything else.
"Can you give me a single reason not to leave right now?" - Not divided in parts.
"The potatoes left the spoon and landed in a single big lump on the plate." - Designed for the use of only one.
"a single room" - Designed for a single use; not reusable.
"the anti-aircraft rocket is fired from a single use launch platform." - Not married nor dating
"Josh put down that he was a single male on the dating website." - Having only one rank or row of petals.
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 single?
- Noun usage: He went to the party, hoping to meet some friendly singles there.
- Noun usage: I don't have any singles, so you'll have to make change.
- Verb usage: Eddie singled out his favorite marble from the bag.
- Verb usage: Evonne always wondered why Ernest had singled her out of the group of giggling girls she hung around with.
- Verb usage: Pedro singled in the bottom of the eighth inning, which, if converted to a run, would put the team back into contention.
- Adjective usage: Can you give me a single reason not to leave right now?
- Adjective usage: The potatoes left the spoon and landed in a single big lump on the plate.
- Adjective usage: a single room
- Adjective usage: the anti-aircraft rocket is fired from a single use launch platform.
- Adjective usage: Josh put down that he was a single male on the dating website.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of single 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 single, 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).
