Word Type
Stiff can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.
stiff used as an adjective:
- Of an object, rigid, hard to bend, inflexible.
- Of policies and rules and their application and enforcement, inflexible.
- Of a person, formal in behavior, unrelaxed.
- Harsh, severe.
"He was eventually caught, and given a stiff fine." - Of muscles, or parts of the body, painful, as a result of excessive, or unaccustomed exercise.
"My legs are stiff after climbing that hill yesterday." - potent.
"A stiff drink; a stiff dose; a stiff breeze." - dead, deceased
- Of a penis, erect
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 →
stiff used as a noun:
- An average person, usually male, of no particular distinction, skill, or education, often a working stiff or lucky stiff.
"A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember was published in 2003." - A person who is deceived, as a mark or pigeon in a swindle.
"She convinced the stiff to go to her hotel room, where her henchman was waiting to rob him." - A cadaver, a dead person.
- A person who leaves (especially a restaurant) without paying the bill.
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 →
stiff used as a verb:
- To fail to pay that which one owes (implicitly or explicitly) to another, especially by departing hastily.
"Realizing he had forgotten his wallet, he stiffed the taxi driver when the cab stopped for a red light."
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 stiff?
- Adjective usage: He was eventually caught, and given a stiff fine.
- Adjective usage: My legs are stiff after climbing that hill yesterday.
- Adjective usage: A stiff drink; a stiff dose; a stiff breeze.
- Noun usage: A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember was published in 2003.
- Noun usage: She convinced the stiff to go to her hotel room, where her henchman was waiting to rob him.
- Verb usage: Realizing he had forgotten his wallet, he stiffed the taxi driver when the cab stopped for a red light.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of stiff 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 stiff, 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).