WordType Logo

Word Type

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

trim used as a verb:

  1. to reduce slightly; to cut; especially, to remove excess; e.g. 'trim a hedge', 'trim a beard'.
    "Place the screen material in the frame, secure it in place, and trim the edges."
  2. to decorate or adorn; especially, to decorate a Christmas tree
    "They traditionally trim the tree on Christmas Eve."
  3. To modify the angle of a vessel to the water by shifting cargo or ballast; to adjust for sailing; to assume, or cause a vessel to assume, a certain position, or trim, in the water. (FM 55-501).
  4. To modify the angle of a vessel's sails relative to the wind, especially to set the sails to the most advantageous angle.

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 →

trim used as an adjective:

  1. physically fit
    "He goes jogging every day to keep trim."
  2. slender, lean; as a trim figure
  3. neat or smart in appearance; as a trim lawn

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 →

trim used as an adverb:

  1. In good order, properly managed or maintained.
  2. With sails well trimmed.

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

trim used as a noun:

  1. decoration; especially, decoration placed along edges or borders
    "Paint the house white with blue trim."
  2. a haircut, especially a moderate one to touch up an existing style
    "I went to the hairdresser for a trim and came back nearly bald."
  3. the manner in which something is equipped or adorned; especially, of a car
    "The car comes in three different trims."
  4. engaging in sexual intercourse
  5. The fore-and-aft angle of the vessel to the water, with reference to the cargo and ballast; the manner in which a vessel floats on the water, whether on an even keel or down by the head or stern
  6. The arrangement of the sails with reference to the wind.

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 →

Related Searches

What type of word is trim?

As detailed above, 'trim' can be a verb, an adjective, an adverb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: Place the screen material in the frame, secure it in place, and trim the edges.
  2. Verb usage: The company trimmed jobs for the second time this year.
  3. Verb usage: They traditionally trim the tree on Christmas Eve.
  4. Adjective usage: He goes jogging every day to keep trim.
  5. Noun usage: Paint the house white with blue trim.
  6. Noun usage: I went to the hairdresser for a trim and came back nearly bald.
  7. Noun usage: The car comes in three different trims.

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

Recent Queries