Word Type
Wick can be a verb, a noun or an adjective.
wick used as a verb:
- To convey or draw off (liquid) by capillary action.
"The fabric wicks perspiration away from the body." - To traverse (i.e. be conveyed by capillary action) through a wick or other porous material, as water through a sponge. Usually followed by .
"The moisture slowly wicked through the wood." - To strike (a stone) obliquely; to strike (a stationary stone) just enough that the played stone changes direction.
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 →
wick used as a noun:
- A bundle, twist, braid, or woven strip of cord, fabric, fiber, or other porous material in a candle, oil lamp, kerosene heater, or the like, that draws up liquid fuel, such as melted tallow, wax, or the oil, delivering it to the base of the flame for conversion to gases and burning; any other length of material burned for illumination in small successive portions.
"Trim the wick fairly short, so that the flame does not smoke." - Any piece of porous material that conveys liquid by capillary action; e.g. a strip of gauze placed in a wound to serve as a drain.
- A narrow opening in the field, flanked by other players' stones.
- A shot where the played stone touches a stationary stone just enough that the played stone changes direction.
- A farm, especially a dairy farm.
- A village; hamlet; castle; dwelling; street; creek; bay; harbour; a place of work, jurisdiction, or exercise of authority.
- Liveliness; life.
"I niver knew such an a thing afore in all my wick. — Ashby, 12 July 1875" - The growing part of a plant nearest to the roots.
"Fed close? Why, it's eaten into t' hard wick. (spoken of a pasture which has been fed very close)" - A maggot.
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 →
wick used as an adjective:
- Alive; lively; full of life; active; bustling; nimble; quick.
"as wick as an eel"
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 wick?
- Verb usage: The fabric wicks perspiration away from the body.
- Verb usage: The moisture slowly wicked through the wood.
- Noun usage: Trim the wick fairly short, so that the flame does not smoke.
- Noun usage: I niver knew such an a thing afore in all my wick. — Ashby, 12 July 1875
- Noun usage: Fed close? Why, it's eaten into t' hard wick. (spoken of a pasture which has been fed very close)
- Adjective usage: as wick as an eel
- Adjective usage: T' wickest young chap at ivver Ah seen.
- Adjective usage: He's a strange wick bairn alus runnin' aboot.
- Adjective usage: I'll skin ye wick! (skin you alive)
- Adjective usage: I thowt they was dead last back end but they're wick enif noo.
- Adjective usage: "Are you afraid of going across the churchyard in the dark?" "Lor' bless yer noä miss! It isn't dead uns I'm scar'd on, it's wick uns."
- Adjective usage: I'll swop wi' him my poor dead horse for his wick. — Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England, page 210
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of wick 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 wick, 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).
