Word Type
Span can be a noun or a verb.
span used as a noun:
- The space from the thumb to the end of the little finger when extended; nine inches; eighth of a fathom.
- Hence, a small space or a brief portion of time.
- The spread or extent of an arch or between its abutments, or of a beam, girder, truss, roof, bridge, or the like, between supports.
- The length of a cable, wire, rope, chain between two consecutive supports.
- A rope having its ends made fast so that a purchase can be hooked to the bight; also, a rope made fast in the center so that both ends can be used.
- A pair of horses or other animals driven together; usually, such a pair of horses when similar in color, form, and action.
- the space of all linear combinations of something
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 →
span used as a verb:
- To traverse the distance between.
"The suspension bridge spanned the canyon as tenuously as one could imagine." - To cover or extend over an area or time period.
"The parking lot spans 3 acres." - Two horses of the same color drawing a carriage, moving in perfect unison.
- to generate an entire space by means of linear combinations
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"1890: So they went in to where Gudruda sat spinning in the hall, singing as she span. — H. Rider Haggard, Eric Brighteyes [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2721]"
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 span?
- Verb usage: The suspension bridge spanned the canyon as tenuously as one could imagine.
- Verb usage: The parking lot spans 3 acres.
- Verb usage: The novel spans three centuries.
- Verb usage: Terry Fox fame spans globe.
- Verb usage: World record! 5GHz WiFi connection spans 189 miles. [http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/27/world-record-5ghz-wifi-connection-spans-189-miles/]
- Verb usage: 1890: So they went in to where Gudruda sat spinning in the hall, singing as she span. — H. Rider Haggard, Eric Brighteyes [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2721]
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of span 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 span, 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).
