Word Type
soft is an adjective:
- Giving way under pressure.
"My head sank easily into the soft pillow." - Smooth and flexible.
"Polish the silver with a soft cloth to avoid scratching." - Gentle.
"There was a soft breeze blowing." - Having an acute angle.
"At the intersection, there are two roads going to the left. Take the soft left." - Quiet.
"I could hear the soft rustle of the leaves in the trees." - voiced, sonant
"DH represents the voiced (soft) th of English these clothes. — The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien" - voiceless
- palatalized
- Lacking strength or resolve, wimpy.
"When it comes to drinking, he is as soft as they come." - Low in dissolved calcium compounds.
"You won't need as much soap, as the water here is very soft." - (Northern British, colloquial) Foolish.
- Of a ferromagnetic material; a material that becomes essentially non magnetic when an external magnetic field is removed, a material with a low magnetic coercivity. (c.f. hard)
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 soft?
- Adjective usage: My head sank easily into the soft pillow.
- Adjective usage: Polish the silver with a soft cloth to avoid scratching.
- Adjective usage: There was a soft breeze blowing.
- Adjective usage: At the intersection, there are two roads going to the left. Take the soft left.
- Adjective usage: I could hear the soft rustle of the leaves in the trees.
- Adjective usage: DH represents the voiced (soft) th of English these clothes. — The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
- Adjective usage: When it comes to drinking, he is as soft as they come.
- Adjective usage: You won't need as much soap, as the water here is very soft.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of soft 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 soft, 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).
