Word Type
Waste can be a noun, a verb or an adjective.
waste used as a noun:
- A waste land; an uninhabited desolate region; a wilderness.
- A place that has been laid waste or destroyed.
- A large tract of uncultivated land.
- A vast expanse of water.
- A disused mine or part of one.
- The action or progress of wasting; extravagant consumption or ineffectual use.
"That was a waste of time" - Large abundance of something, especially without it being used.
- Gradual loss or decay.
- A decaying of the body by disease; wasting away.
- Destruction or devastation caused by war or natural disasters; See "to lay waste"
- Excess of material, useless by-products or damaged, unsaleable products; garbage; rubbish.
- Excrement (animal waste, human waste).
- A cause of action which may be brought by the owner of a future interest in property against the current owner of that property to prevent the current owner from degrading the value or character of the property, either intentionally or through neglect.
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 →
waste used as a verb:
- To devastate or destroy.
- Use up, diminish, reduce by gradual loss; decay; emaciate.
"After he lost hope, he wasted away." - Squander money or resources uselessly; spend time idly.
"We wasted millions of dollars and several years on that project." - Kill; murder.
- Gradually lose weight or weaken.
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 →
waste used as an adjective:
- Uncultivated or unhabited; barren; desert.
- Rejected as being defective; eliminated as being worthless; produced in excess.
- Superfluous; needless.
- Unfortunate; Disappointing.
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is waste?
- Noun usage: That was a waste of time
- Noun usage: Her life seemed a waste
- Verb usage: After he lost hope, he wasted away.
- Verb usage: We wasted millions of dollars and several years on that project.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of waste 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 waste, 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).
