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Where can be an adverb, a conjunction, a noun or a pronoun.

where used as an adverb:

  1. (used interrogatively, in either a direct or indirect question) At what place; to what place; what place.
    "Where are you?"
  2. In what situation.
    "Where would we be without our parents?"

An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →

where used as a conjunction:

  1. While on the contrary; although; whereas.
    "Where Susy has trouble coloring inside the lines, Johnny has already mastered shading."
  2. At or in which place or situation.
    "He is looking for a house where he can have a complete office."
  3. To which place or situation.
    "The snowbirds travel where it is warm."
  4. Wherever.
    "Their job is to go where they are called."
  5. In a position, case, etc., in which.
    "Where no provision under this Act is applicable, the case shall be decided in accordance with the customary pratices."

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 →

where used as a noun:

  1. The place in which something happens.
    "A good article will cover the who, the what, the when, the where, the why and the how."

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 →

where used as a pronoun:

  1. The place in which.
    "He lives within five miles of where he was born."

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 →

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What type of word is where?

As detailed above, 'where' can be an adverb, a conjunction, a noun or a pronoun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adverb usage: Where are you?
  2. Adverb usage: Where are you going?
  3. Adverb usage: Where did you come from?
  4. Adverb usage: Where would we be without our parents?
  5. Conjunction usage: Where Susy has trouble coloring inside the lines, Johnny has already mastered shading.
  6. Conjunction usage: He is looking for a house where he can have a complete office.
  7. Conjunction usage: The snowbirds travel where it is warm.
  8. Conjunction usage: Their job is to go where they are called.
  9. Conjunction usage: Where no provision under this Act is applicable, the case shall be decided in accordance with the customary pratices.
  10. Noun usage: A good article will cover the who, the what, the when, the where, the why and the how.
  11. Pronoun usage: He lives within five miles of where he was born.

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