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Turn can be a verb or a noun.

turn used as a verb:

  1. Of a body, person, etc, to move around an axis through itself.
    "the Earth turns"
  2. To change the direction or orientation of.
    "Turn the knob clockwise."
  3. To change one's direction of travel.
    "Turn right here."
  4. To position (something) by folding it.
    "Turn the bed covers."
  5. To become .
    "The leaves turn brown in autumn."
  6. To fundamentally change; to metamorphose.
    "Midas made everything turn to gold."
  7. To rebel; to go against something formerly tolerated.
    "The prisoners turned on the warden."
  8. To shape (something) symmetrically by rotating it against a stationary cutting tool, as on a lathe.
    "She turned the table legs with care and precision."
  9. To sour or spoil; to go bad.
    "This milk has turned; it smells awful."
  10. To complete.
    "They say they can turn the parts in two days."
  11. Of a bowler, to make (the ball) move sideways off the pitch when it bounces.
  12. Of a ball, to move sideways off the pitch when it bounces.
  13. To change personalities, such as from being a face (good guy) to heel (bad guy) or vice versa.

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 →

turn used as a noun:

  1. A change of direction or orientation.
    "Give the handle a turn, then pull it."
  2. A movement of an object about its own axis in one direction that continues until the object returns to its initial orientation.
  3. A single loop of a coil.
  4. A chance to use (something) shared in sequence with others.
    "They took turns playing with the new toy."
  5. One's chance to make a move in a game having two or more players.
  6. A figure in music, often denoted ~, consisting of the note above the one indicated, the note itself, the note below the one indicated, and the note itself again.
  7. (also turnaround) The time required to complete a project.
    "They quote a three-day turn on parts like those."
  8. A fit or a period of giddiness.
    "I've had a funny turn."
  9. A change in temperament or circumstance.
    "She took a turn for the worse."
  10. A sideways movement of the ball when it bounces (caused by rotation in flight)
  11. The fourth communal card in Texas hold 'em.
  12. The flop (the first three community cards) in Texas hold 'em
  13. the basic coil element that forms a single conducting loop comprised of one insulated conductor.
  14. A deed done to another.
    "One good turn deserves another."

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 →

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What type of word is turn?

As detailed above, 'turn' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: the Earth turns
  2. Verb usage: turn on the spot
  3. Verb usage: Turn the knob clockwise.
  4. Verb usage: Turn right here.
  5. Verb usage: Turn the bed covers.
  6. Verb usage: The leaves turn brown in autumn.
  7. Verb usage: When I asked him for the money, he turned nasty.
  8. Verb usage: Midas made everything turn to gold.
  9. Verb usage: He turned into a monster every full moon.
  10. Verb usage: The prisoners turned on the warden.
  11. Verb usage: She turned the table legs with care and precision.
  12. Verb usage: This milk has turned; it smells awful.
  13. Verb usage: They say they can turn the parts in two days.
  14. Noun usage: Give the handle a turn, then pull it.
  15. Noun usage: They took turns playing with the new toy.
  16. Noun usage: They quote a three-day turn on parts like those.
  17. Noun usage: I've had a funny turn.
  18. Noun usage: She took a turn for the worse.
  19. Noun usage: One good turn deserves another.
  20. Noun usage: I felt that the man was of a vindictive nature, and would do me an evil turn if he found the opportunity...

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