Word Type
Spare can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.
spare used as an adjective:
- scanty; not abundant or plentiful.
"a spare diet" - sparing; frugal; parsimonious; chary.
- Being over and above what is necessary, or what must be used or reserved; not wanted, or not used; superfluous.
"I have no spare time." - Held in reserve, to be used in an emergency; as, a spare anchor; a spare bed or room.
- lean; wanting flesh; meager; thin; gaunt.
- slow
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 →
spare used as a noun:
- The act of sparing; moderation; restraint.
- Parsimony; frugal use.
- An opening in a petticoat or gown; a placket.
- That which has not been used or expended.
- A spare part, especially a spare tire.
- The right of bowling again at a full set of pins, after having knocked all the pins down in less than three bowls. If all the pins are knocked down in one bowl it is a double spare; in two bowls, a single spare.
- The act of knocking down all remaining pins in second ball of a frame; this entitles the pins knocked down on the next ball to be added to the score for that frame.
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 →
spare used as a verb:
- To desist; to stop; to refrain.
- To refrain from inflicting harm; to use mercy or forbearance.
- To preserve from danger or punishment; to forbear to punish, injure, or harm; to show mercy.
"Kill me, if you please, or spare me. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island, 1883." - To be frugal; not to be profuse; to live frugally; to be parsimonious.
- To keep to one's self; to forbear to impart or give.
- To save or gain, as by frugality; to reserve, as from some occupation, use, or duty.
- To deprive one's self of, as by being frugal; to do without; to dispense with; to give up; to part with.
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 spare?
- Adjective usage: a spare diet
- Adjective usage: I have no spare time.
- Verb usage: Kill me, if you please, or spare me. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island, 1883.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of spare 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 spare, 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).
