Word Type
Slick can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.
slick used as a noun:
- A covering of liquid, particularly oil.
"Careful in turn three — there's an oil slick on the road." - A tire with a smooth surface instead of a tread pattern, often used in auto racing.
"You'll go much faster if you put on slicks." - A helicopter.
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 →
slick used as an adjective:
- Slippery due to a covering of liquid; often used to describe appearances.
"This rain is making the roads slick." - Appearing expensive or sophisticated.
"They read all kinds of slick magazines." - Superficially convincing but actually untrustworthy.
"That new sales rep is slick. Be sure to read the fine print before you buy anything." - Clever, making an apparently hard task easy; often used sarcastically.
"Our new process for extracting needles from haystacks is extremely slick." - Extraordinarily great or special.
"That is one slick bicycle, it has all sorts of features!"
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 →
slick used as a verb:
- To make slick
"The surface had been slicked."
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 slick?
- Noun usage: Careful in turn three — there's an oil slick on the road.
- Noun usage: The oil slick has now spread to cover the entire bay, critically endangering the sea life.
- Noun usage: You'll go much faster if you put on slicks.
- Adjective usage: This rain is making the roads slick.
- Adjective usage: The top coating of lacquer gives this finish a slick look.
- Adjective usage: They read all kinds of slick magazines.
- Adjective usage: That new sales rep is slick. Be sure to read the fine print before you buy anything.
- Adjective usage: Our new process for extracting needles from haystacks is extremely slick.
- Adjective usage: That was a slick move, locking your keys in the car.
- Adjective usage: That is one slick bicycle, it has all sorts of features!
- Verb usage: The surface had been slicked.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of slick 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 slick, 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).
