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Top can be a noun, a verb, an adverb or an adjective.

top used as a noun:

  1. That part of an object furthest away in the opposite direction from that in which an unsupported object would fall.
    "His kite got caught at the top of the tree."
  2. The part viewed, or intended to be viewed, nearest the edge of the visual field normally occupied by the uppermost visible objects.
    "Headings appear at the tops of pages. Or, Further weather information can be found at the top of your television screen."
  3. A lid, cap or cover of a container.
  4. A garment worn to cover the torso.
  5. A child's spinning toy; a spinning top
  6. A framework at the top of a ship's mast to which rigging is attached
  7. The first half of an inning, during which the home team fields and the visiting team bats.
  8. A dominant partner in a BDSM relationship or roleplay.
  9. A gay man who likes take an active sexual role rather than a passive role (e.g. to penetrate in anal sex rather than be penetrated).

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 →

top used as a verb:

  1. To cover on the top or with a top.
  2. To cut or remove the top (as of a tree)
  3. To excel, to beat.
  4. To kill, murder.
  5. To be the dominant partner in a BDSM relationship or roleplay.
  6. To be the partner who penetrates in anal sex.

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 →

top used as an adverb:

  1. Rated first.
    "She came top in her French exam."

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

top used as an adjective:

  1. best.

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 →

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What type of word is top?

As detailed above, 'top' can be a noun, a verb, an adverb or an adjective. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: His kite got caught at the top of the tree.
  2. Noun usage: Headings appear at the tops of pages. Or, Further weather information can be found at the top of your television screen.
  3. Adverb usage: She came top in her French exam.

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