Word Type
Wave can be a verb or a noun.
wave used as a verb:
- To move back and forth repeatedly.
"The flag waved in the gentle breeze." - To wave one's hand in greeting or departure.
"I waved goodbye from across the room." - To have an undulating or wavy form.
- To swing and miss at a pitch.
"Jones waves at strike one." - To cause to move back and forth repeatedly.
"The starter waved the flag to begin the race." - To signal (someone or something) with a waving movement.
- To try, in public, to attract people into a business establishment.
-
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 →
wave used as a noun:
- A moving disturbance in the level of a body of water; undulation.
"The wave traveled from the center of the lake before breaking on the shore." - A moving disturbance in the energy level of a field.
"Gravity waves, while predicted by theory for decades, have been notoriously difficult to detect." - A shape which alternately curves in opposite directions.
"Her hair had a nice wave to it." - A sudden unusually large amount of something that is temporarily experienced.
"A wave of shoppers stampeded through the door when the store opened for its Christmas discount special." - A sideway movement of the hand(s).
"With a wave of the hand."
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 wave?
- Verb usage: The flag waved in the gentle breeze.
- Verb usage: I waved goodbye from across the room.
- Verb usage: Jones waves at strike one.
- Verb usage: The starter waved the flag to begin the race.
- Noun usage: The wave traveled from the center of the lake before breaking on the shore.
- Noun usage: Gravity waves, while predicted by theory for decades, have been notoriously difficult to detect.
- Noun usage: Her hair had a nice wave to it.
- Noun usage: A wave of shoppers stampeded through the door when the store opened for its Christmas discount special.
- Noun usage: A wave of retirees began moving to the coastal area.
- Noun usage: A wave of emotion overcame her when she thought about her son who was killed in battle.
- Noun usage: With a wave of the hand.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of wave 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 wave, 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).
