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Spread can be a verb or a noun.

spread used as a verb:

  1. To stretch out, open out (a material etc.) so that it more fully covers a given area of space.
    "He spread his newspaper on the table."
  2. To extend (individual rays, limbs etc.); to stretch out in varying or opposing directions.
    "I spread my arms wide and welcomed him home."
  3. To disperse, to scatter or distribute over a given area.
    "I spread the rice grains evenly over the floor."
  4. To proliferate; to become more widely present, to be disseminated.
  5. To disseminate; to cause to proliferate, to make (something) widely known or present.
    "The missionaries quickly spread their new message across the country."
  6. To take up a larger area or space; to expand, be extended.
    "I dropped my glass; the water spread quickly over the tiled floor."
  7. To smear, to distribute in a thin layer.
    "She liked to spread butter on her toast while it was still hot.""
  8. To cover (something) with a thin layer of some substance, as of butter.
    "He always spreads his toast with peanut butter and strawberry jam."
  9. To open one's legs.

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 →

spread used as a noun:

  1. The act of spreading or something that has been spread.
  2. An expanse of land.
  3. A piece of material used as a cover (such as a bedspread).
  4. A large meal, especially one laid out on a table.
  5. Any form of food designed to be spread onto a slice of bread etc.
  6. An item in a newspaper or magazine that occupies more than one column or page.
  7. A numerical difference.
  8. The difference between the wholesale and retail prices.
  9. The difference between the price of a futures month and the price of another month of the same commodity.
  10. The purchase of a futures contract of one delivery month against the sale of another futures delivery month of the same commodity.
  11. The purchase of one delivery month of one commodity against the sale of that same delivery month of a different commodity.
  12. An arbitrage transaction of the same commodity in two markets, executed to take advantage of a profit from price discrepancies.
  13. The difference between bidding and asking price.
  14. The difference between the prices of two similar items.

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 →

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What type of word is spread?

As detailed above, 'spread' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: He spread his newspaper on the table.
  2. Verb usage: I spread my arms wide and welcomed him home.
  3. Verb usage: I spread the rice grains evenly over the floor.
  4. Verb usage: The missionaries quickly spread their new message across the country.
  5. Verb usage: I dropped my glass; the water spread quickly over the tiled floor.
  6. Verb usage: She liked to spread butter on her toast while it was still hot."
  7. Verb usage: He always spreads his toast with peanut butter and strawberry jam.

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of spread 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 spread, 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).

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