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Stir can be a noun or a verb.

stir used as a noun:

  1. The act or result of stirring; agitation; tumult; bustle; noise or various movements.
    "Why all these words, this clamor, and this stir? — Sir John Denham."
  2. Public disturbance or commotion; tumultuous disorder; seditious uproar.
    "Being advertised of some stirs raised by his unnatural sons in England. —Sir John Davies."
  3. Agitation of thoughts; conflicting passions.
  4. Jail; prison.
    "He's going to spendin' maybe ten years in stir."

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 →

stir used as a verb:

  1. To change the place of in any manner; to move.
    "My foot I had never yet in five days been able to stir. —Sir William Temple"
  2. To disturb the relative position of the particles of, as of a liquid, by passing something through it; to agitate
    "She stired a pudding with a spoon."
  3. To bring into debate; to agitate; to moot.
    "Stir not questions of jurisdiction. —Francis Bacon"
  4. To incite to action; to arouse; to instigate; to prompt; to excite.
    "To stir men to devotion. —Chaucer"
  5. To move; to change one's position.
    "I had not power to stir or strive, But felt that I was still alive. —Byron."
  6. To be in motion; to be active or bustling; to exert or busy one's self.
    "All are not fit with them to stir and toil. —Byron."
  7. To become the object of notice; to be on foot.
    "They fancy they have a right to talk freely upon everything that stirs or appears. —Isaac Watts."
  8. To rise, or be up, in the morning. —Shakespeare

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 →

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What type of word is stir?

As detailed above, 'stir' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: Why all these words, this clamor, and this stir? — Sir John Denham.
  2. Noun usage: Consider, after so much stir about genus and species, how few words we have yet settled definitions of. —John Locke.
  3. Noun usage: Being advertised of some stirs raised by his unnatural sons in England. —Sir John Davies.
  4. Noun usage: He's going to spendin' maybe ten years in stir.
  5. Verb usage: My foot I had never yet in five days been able to stir. —Sir William Temple
  6. Verb usage: She stired a pudding with a spoon.
  7. Verb usage: My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirred. —Shakespeare
  8. Verb usage: Stir not questions of jurisdiction. —Francis Bacon
  9. Verb usage: To stir men to devotion. —Chaucer
  10. Verb usage: An Ate, stirring him to blood and strife. —Shakespeare
  11. Verb usage: And for her sake some mutiny will stir. —John Dryden.
  12. Verb usage: I had not power to stir or strive, But felt that I was still alive. —Byron.
  13. Verb usage: All are not fit with them to stir and toil. —Byron.
  14. Verb usage: The friends of the unfortunate exile, far from resenting his unjust suspicions, were stirring anxiously in his behalf. — Charles Merivale.
  15. Verb usage: They fancy they have a right to talk freely upon everything that stirs or appears. —Isaac Watts.

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