Word Type
Well can be an adverb, an adjective, an interjection, a noun or a verb.
well used as an adverb:
- Accurately, competently.
"He does his job well." - Completely, fully.
"A well done steak." - To a significant degree.
"That author is well known." - Very (as a general-purpose intensifier).
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
well used as an adjective:
- In good health.
"I had been sick, but now I'm well." - Prudent; good; well-advised.
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 →
well used as an interjection:
- Used to acknowledge a statement or situation (short form for "that is well").
"A: The car is broken." - An exclamation of surprise, often doubled or tripled.
"Well, well, well, what do we have here?" - Used in speech to fill gaps; filled pause.
"It was a bit...well...too loud."
An interjection is an abrupt remark like Oh! or Dear me, or Eww. It is usually used to express the strong emotions of the speaker. The sentence 'Congratulations! You won the gold medal!' shows the use of 'congratulations' as an interjection. Learn more →
well used as a noun:
- A hole sunk into the ground as a source of water, oil, natural gas or other fluids.
- A place where a liquid such as water surfaces naturally, a spring.
- A small depression suitable for holding liquid, or other objects.
- A vertical, cylindrical trunk in a ship, reaching down to the lowest part of the hull, through which the bilge pumps operate.
- The cockpit of a sailboat.
- A well drink.
"They're having a special tonight: $1 wells."
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 →
well used as a verb:
- To seep out of the surface.
"Blood welled from the wound."
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is well?
- Adverb usage: He does his job well.
- Adverb usage: A well done steak.
- Adverb usage: That author is well known.
- Adjective usage: I had been sick, but now I'm well.
- Interjection usage: A: The car is broken.
- Interjection usage: B: Well, we could walk to the movies instead.
- Interjection usage: A: I didn't like the music.
- Interjection usage: B: Well, I thought it was good.
- Interjection usage: A: (Accidentally sets tent on fire).
- Interjection usage: B: Well, I guess we're sleeping under the stars tonight.
- Interjection usage: Well, well, well, what do we have here?
- Interjection usage: It was a bit...well...too loud.
- Noun usage: They're having a special tonight: $1 wells.
- Verb usage: Blood welled from the wound.
- Verb usage: Her eyes welled with tears.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of well 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 well, 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).
