Word Type
Touch can be a noun or a verb.
touch used as a noun:
- An act of touching, especially with the hand or finger.
"Suddenly, in the crowd, I felt a touch at my shoulder." - The faculty or sense of perception by physical contact.
"With the lights out, she had to rely on touch to find her desk." - The style or technique with which one plays a musical instrument.
"He performed one of Ravel's piano concertos with a wonderfully light and playful touch." - A distinguishing feature or characteristic.
"Clever touches like this are what make her such a brilliant writer." - A little bit; a small amount.
"Move it left just a touch and it will be perfect." - The part of a sports field beyond the touchlines or goal-lines.
"He got the ball, and kicked it straight out into touch." - A relationship of close communication or understanding.
"He promised to keep in touch while he was away."
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 →
touch used as a verb:
- Primarily physical senses.
- # To make physical contact with; to bring the hand, finger or other part of the body into contact with.
- #: I touched her face softly.
- # To come into (involuntary) contact with; to meet or intersect.
- #: Sitting on the bench, the hem of her skirt touched the ground.
- # To come into physical contact, or to be in physical contact.
- #: They stood next to each other, their shoulders touching.
- # To make physical contact with a thing.
- #: Please can I have a look, if I promise not to touch?
- # To physically disturb; to interfere with, molest, or attempt to harm through contact.
- #: If you touch her, I'll kill you.
- # To physically affect in specific ways implied by context.
- #: Frankly, this wood's so strong that sandpaper won't touch it.
- # To consume, or otherwise use.
- #: Are you all right? You've hardly touched your lunch.
- # Of a ship or its passengers: to land, to make a short stop (at).
- #* 1851, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick:
- #*: Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain--this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg's sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten.
- # To sexually excite with the fingers; to finger or masturbate.
- #: Her parents had caught her touching herself when she was fifteen.
- Primarily non-physical senses.
- # To imbue or endow with a specific quality.
- #: My grandfather, as many people know, was touched with greatness.
- # To deal with in speech or writing; to mention briefly, to allude to.
- #* 1621, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, I.2.4.vii:
- #*: Next to sorrow still I may annex such accidents as procure fear; for besides those terrors which I have before touched, [...] there is a superstitious fear [...] which much trouble many of us.
- # To concern, to have a bearing on.
- #: Stay out of this, it doesn't touch you in any way.
- # To affect emotionally; to bring about tender or painful feelings in.
- #: Stefan was touched by the song's message of hope.
- # To affect in a negative way, especially only slightly.
- #: He had been drinking over lunch, and was clearly touched.
- # To give royal assent to by touching it with the sceptre.
- #: The bill was finally touched after many hours of deliberation.
- # To steal, or obtain money; to borrow money from.
- #: I was running short, so I touched old Bertie for a fiver.
- # To disturb the mental functions of; to make somewhat insane.
- #: You must be touched if you think I'm taking your advice.
- # To be on the level of; to approach in excellence or quality.
- #* 1928, Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers", in Lord Peter Views the Body,
- #*: There was his mistress, Maria Morano. I don't think I've ever seen anything to touch her, and when you work for the screen [as I do] you're apt to have a pretty exacting standard of female beauty.
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 touch?
- Noun usage: Suddenly, in the crowd, I felt a touch at my shoulder.
- Noun usage: With the lights out, she had to rely on touch to find her desk.
- Noun usage: He performed one of Ravel's piano concertos with a wonderfully light and playful touch.
- Noun usage: Clever touches like this are what make her such a brilliant writer.
- Noun usage: Move it left just a touch and it will be perfect.
- Noun usage: He got the ball, and kicked it straight out into touch.
- Noun usage: He promised to keep in touch while he was away.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of touch 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 touch, 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).
