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To can be a particle, an adverb or a preposition.

to used as a particle:

  1. A particle used to mark the following verb as an infinitive.
    "I want to leave."
  2. As above, with the verb implied.
    ""Did you visit the museum?" "I wanted to, but it was closed.""

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to used as an adverb:

  1. Toward a closed, touching or engaging position.
    "Please would you push the door to."

An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →

to used as a preposition:

  1. In the direction of, and arriving at (indicating destination).
    "We are walking to the shop."

  2. "He devoted himself to education."

  3. "His face was beaten to a pulp."

  4. "similar to ..., relevant to ..., pertinent to ..., I was nice to him, he was cruel to her, I am used to walking."

  5. "one to one = 1:1"
  6. .
    "Three squared or three to the second power is nine."

  7. "I gave the book to him."
  8. Preceding
    "ten to ten = 9:50; We're going to leave at ten to (the hour)."
  9. at
    "Stay where you're to and I'll come find you, b'y."

Prepositions are used to show the relationship between a noun or pronoun and another word. Examples of prepositions are: in, during, beside, after, for. In the sentence "Sows suffer in factory farms." The preposition "in" tells us the position of the sow relative to the factory farm. Learn more →

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What type of word is to?

As detailed above, 'to' can be a particle, an adverb or a preposition. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Particle usage: I want to leave.
  2. Particle usage: He asked me what to do.
  3. Particle usage: I don’t know how to say it.
  4. Particle usage: I have places to go and people to see.
  5. Particle usage: To err is human.
  6. Particle usage: To be, or not to be: that is the question:
  7. Particle usage: "Did you visit the museum?" "I wanted to, but it was closed."
  8. Particle usage: If he hasn't read it yet, he ought to.
  9. Adverb usage: Please would you push the door to.
  10. Preposition usage: We are walking to the shop.
  11. Preposition usage: He devoted himself to education.
  12. Preposition usage: They drank to his health.
  13. Preposition usage: His face was beaten to a pulp.
  14. Preposition usage: similar to ..., relevant to ..., pertinent to ..., I was nice to him, he was cruel to her, I am used to walking.
  15. Preposition usage: one to one = 1:1
  16. Preposition usage: ten to one = 10:1.
  17. Preposition usage: Three squared or three to the second power is nine.
  18. Preposition usage: Three to the power of two is nine.
  19. Preposition usage: Three to the second is nine.
  20. Preposition usage: I gave the book to him.
  21. Preposition usage: ten to ten = 9:50; We're going to leave at ten to (the hour).
  22. Preposition usage: Stay where you're to and I'll come find you, b'y.

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