Word Type
Smear can be a verb or a noun.
smear used as a verb:
- To spread (a substance, especially one that colours or is dirty) across a surface by rubbing.
"The artist smeared paint over the canvas in broad strokes." - To have a substance smeared on (a surface).
"She smeared her lips with lipstick." - To damage someone's reputation by slandering, misrepresenting, or otherwise making false accusations about an individual, their statements, or their actions.
"The opposition party attempted to smear the candidate by spreading incorrect and unverifiable rumors about their personal behavior." - To become spread by smearing.
"The paint is still wet — don't touch it or it will smear."
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 →
smear used as a noun:
- A mark made by smearing.
"This detergent cleans windows without leaving smears." - A Pap smear.
"I'm going to the doctor's this afternoon for a smear." - A false attack.
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 smear?
- Verb usage: The artist smeared paint over the canvas in broad strokes.
- Verb usage: She smeared her lips with lipstick.
- Verb usage: The opposition party attempted to smear the candidate by spreading incorrect and unverifiable rumors about their personal behavior.
- Verb usage: The paint is still wet — don't touch it or it will smear.
- Noun usage: This detergent cleans windows without leaving smears.
- Noun usage: I'm going to the doctor's this afternoon for a smear.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of smear 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 smear, 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).
