Word Type
Sjambok can be a noun or a verb.
sjambok used as a noun:
- A stout whip, especially made of rhinoceros or hippopotamus hide.
"1963: Foppl stood holding a sjambok or cattle whip of giraffe hide, tapping the handle against his leg in a steady, syncopated figure. — Thomas Pynchon, V."
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 →
sjambok used as a verb:
- To whip with a sjambok; to horsewhip.
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 sjambok?
- Noun usage: 1963: Foppl stood holding a sjambok or cattle whip of giraffe hide, tapping the handle against his leg in a steady, syncopated figure. — Thomas Pynchon, V.
- Noun usage: 1989: If dialogue is ever to have a chance, South Africans must find a way to turn away from violence in all its forms — the brutal violence of the sjambok — United States Policy Toward South Africa: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on African Affairs by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. Subcommittee on African Affairs: p.333
- Noun usage: 2006 Police arrested almost 40 locals yesterday after a crowd took part in illegal marches and refused to disperse. The locals were armed with sticks, sjamboks and other weapons. - Weekend Argus May 13/14 2006 p.1.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of sjambok 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 sjambok, 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).