Word Type
Steam can be an adjective, a verb or a noun.
steam used as an adjective:
- Old-fashioned; from before the digital age.
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 →
steam used as a verb:
- To cook with steam
- To produce or vent steam.
- To become angry; to fume; to be incensed.
- To make angry.
"It really steams me to see her treat him like that." - To be covered with condensed water vapor.
"With all the heavy breathing going on the windows were quickly steamed in the car." - To travel by means of steam power.
"We steamed around the Mediterranean." - To move with great or excessive purposefulness.
"If he heard of anyone picking the fruit he would steam off and lecture them."
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 →
steam used as a noun:
- The vapor formed when water changes from liquid phase to gas phase.
- Pressurized water vapour used for heating, cooking, or to provide mechanical energy.
- Internal energy for motive power.
"After three weeks in bed he was finally able to sit up under his own steam." - Pent-up anger.
"Dad had to go outside to blow off some steam." - A steam-powered vehicle.
- Travel by means of a steam-powered vehicle
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 steam?
- Verb usage: It really steams me to see her treat him like that.
- Verb usage: With all the heavy breathing going on the windows were quickly steamed in the car.
- Verb usage: We steamed around the Mediterranean.
- Verb usage: If he heard of anyone picking the fruit he would steam off and lecture them.
- Noun usage: After three weeks in bed he was finally able to sit up under his own steam.
- Noun usage: Dad had to go outside to blow off some steam.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of steam 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 steam, 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).
