Word Type
Trough can be a verb or a noun.
trough used as a verb:
- To eat in a vulgar style, as if eating from a trough
"he troughed his way through 3 meat pies."
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 →
trough used as a noun:
- A long, narrow container, open on top, for feeding or watering animals.
"One of Hank's chores was to slop the pigs' trough each morning and evening." - Any similarly shaped container.
"Ernest threw his paint brushes into a kind of trough he had fashioned from sheet metal that he kept in the sink." - (Canadian) A gutter under the eaves of a building; eaves trough.
"The troughs were filled with leaves and needed cleaning." - A short, narrow canal designed to hold water until it drains or evaporates.
"There was a small trough that the sump pump emptied into; it was filled with mosquito larvae." - A long, narrow depression between waves or ridges.
"The buoy bobbed between the crests and troughs of the waves moving across the bay." - A linear atmospheric depression associated with a weather front.
- (Australia, New Zealand) A rectangular container used for washing clothes, a channel for conveying water or other farm liquids (such as milk) from place to place by gravity, or any general 'U' or 'V' shaped channel conveying water for irrigation purposes.
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 trough?
- Verb usage: he troughed his way through 3 meat pies.
- Noun usage: One of Hank's chores was to slop the pigs' trough each morning and evening.
- Noun usage: Ernest threw his paint brushes into a kind of trough he had fashioned from sheet metal that he kept in the sink.
- Noun usage: The troughs were filled with leaves and needed cleaning.
- Noun usage: There was a small trough that the sump pump emptied into; it was filled with mosquito larvae.
- Noun usage: The buoy bobbed between the crests and troughs of the waves moving across the bay.
- Noun usage: The neurologist pointed to a troubling trough in the patter of his brain-waves.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of trough 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 trough, 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).
