Word Type
What can be an adverb, a pronoun, an interjection, a conjunction or a determiner.
what used as an adverb:
- in some manner or degree; in part; partly; usually followed by with.
"What with singing and joking, the time passed quickly." - Such; this is; that is.
"What a pity." - Why?
- Used to introduce each of two coordinate phrases or concepts; both...and.
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
what used as a pronoun:
- which thing, event, circumstance, etc.: used interrogatively in asking for the specification of an identity, quantity, quality, etc.
"What is your address?" -
"It's rather late, what?" - that; which
A pronoun is a placeholder for a noun. Examples of pronouns are: them, he, they, it. Pronouns make sentences shorter and clearer since they replace nouns. For example, instead of saying 'Emily was happy, so Emily smiled.' you can say 'Emily was happy, so she smiled.' Learn more →
what used as an interjection:
- an expression of surprise or disbelief.
"What! That’s amazing." - (UK) (colloquial) is that not true?
"It’s a nice day, what? (sometimes repeated, e.g.: What-what?)" - (UK) (colloquial) greeting (archaic).
"What ho, Frobisher!"
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 →
what used as a conjunction:
- that which; those that; the thing that
"He knows what he wants."
Conjunctions are connector words. Examples of conjunctions are: and, but, so. They help us to group words and connect phrases, like in the sentence: "We have apples and oranges, but we need bananas." Learn more →
what used as a determiner:
- which; which kind of.
"What shirt are you going to wear?" - how much; how great (used in an exclamation)
"What talent he has!"
Determiners are a special kind of describing word used with nouns. In the sentence "Some people don't eat animals." the determiner "some" modifies the "people" noun so that refers specifically to a subset of people. In the sentence "The person doesn't eat animals." the determiner "the" modifies the "person" noun so it refers to a specific person that would be evident if we had more context. Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is what?
- Adverb usage: What with singing and joking, the time passed quickly.
- Adverb usage: What a pity.
- Adverb usage: What a beautiful day!
- Pronoun usage: What is your address?
- Pronoun usage: You told them what?
- Pronoun usage: It's rather late, what?
- Interjection usage: What! That’s amazing.
- Interjection usage: It’s a nice day, what? (sometimes repeated, e.g.: What-what?)
- Interjection usage: What ho, Frobisher!
- Conjunction usage: He knows what he wants.
- Determiner usage: What shirt are you going to wear?
- Determiner usage: What time is it?
- Determiner usage: What kind of car is that?
- Determiner usage: What talent he has!
- Determiner usage: What a talent!
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of what 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 what, 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).
