Word Type
Tank can be a noun or a verb.
tank used as a noun:
- A container for liquids or gases, typically with a volume of several cubic metres.
- An armoured fighting vehicle, armed with a gun in a turret, and moving on caterpillar tracks.
- (Australian and Indian English), a reservoir or dam.
- (American SouthWest English, esp Texas), a large metal container, usually placed near a wind-driven water pump, in an animal pen or field. By extension a small pond for the same purpose.
- A very muscular and physically imposing person. Somebody who is built like a tank.
- In USA scuba divers' usage, a compressed air or gas cylinder.
- In online and offline role-playing games, a character designed primarily around damage absorption and holding the attention of the enemy with offensive power as a close secondary consideration.
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 →
tank used as a verb:
- To fail or fall (often used in describing the economy or the stock market); to degenerate or decline rapidly; to plummet.
- (Video game jargon) To attract the attacks of an enemy target in cooperative team-based combat, so that one's teammates can defeat the enemy in question more efficiently.
- To put fuel into a tank
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 tank?
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of tank 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 tank, 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).
