Word Type
Tear can be a noun or a verb.
tear used as a noun:
- A hole or break caused by tearing.
"A small tear is easy to mend, if it is on the seam." - A drop of clear, salty liquid produced from the eyes by crying or irritation.
"There were big tears rolling down Lisa's cheeks."
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 →
tear used as a verb:
- To rend (a solid material) by holding or restraining in two places and pulling apart, whether intentionally or not; to destroy or separate.
"He tore his coat on the nail." - To remove by tearing.
"Tear the coupon out of the newspaper." - to demolish
"The slums were torn down to make way for the new development" - To become torn, especially accidentally.
"My dress has torn." - To move at excessive speed.
"He went tearing down the hill at 90 miles per hour." - To produce tears
"Her eyes began to tear in the harsh wind."
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 tear?
- Noun usage: A small tear is easy to mend, if it is on the seam.
- Noun usage: There were big tears rolling down Lisa's cheeks.
- Noun usage: Ryan wiped the tear from the paper he was crying on.
- Verb usage: He tore his coat on the nail.
- Verb usage: Tear the coupon out of the newspaper.
- Verb usage: The slums were torn down to make way for the new development
- Verb usage: My dress has torn.
- Verb usage: He went tearing down the hill at 90 miles per hour.
- Verb usage: Her eyes began to tear in the harsh wind.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of tear 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 tear, 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).
