Word Type
Will can be a noun or a verb.
will used as a noun:
- Desire, longing. (Now generally merged with later senses.)
"He felt a great will to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land." - One's independent faculty of choice; the ability to be able to exercise one's choice or intention.
"Of course, man's will is often regulated by his reason." - One's intention or decision; someone's orders or commands.
"Eventually I submitted to my parents' will." - That which is desired; one's wish.
"She always had her will." - The act of choosing to do something; a person's conscious intent or volition.
"Most creatures have a will to live." - A formal declaration of one's intent concerning the disposal of one's property and holdings after death; the legal document stating such wishes.
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 →
will used as a verb:
- To wish, desire.
- To instruct (that something be done) in one's will.
- To try to make (something) happen by using one's will (intention).
"All the fans were willing their team to win the game." - To bequeath (something) to someone in one's will (legal document).
"He willed his stamp collection to the local museum." - To wish, desire (something).
- To wish or desire (that something happen); to intend (that).
- To habitually do (a given action).
- To choose to (do something), used to express intention but without any temporal connotations (+ bare infinitive).
- Used to express the future tense, formerly with some implication of volition, especially in first-person. Compare .
- To be able to, to have the capacity to.
"Unfortunately, only one of these gloves will actually fit over my hand."
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 will?
- Noun usage: He felt a great will to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
- Noun usage: Of course, man's will is often regulated by his reason.
- Noun usage: Eventually I submitted to my parents' will.
- Noun usage: She always had her will.
- Noun usage: Most creatures have a will to live.
- Verb usage: All the fans were willing their team to win the game.
- Verb usage: He willed his stamp collection to the local museum.
- Verb usage: Unfortunately, only one of these gloves will actually fit over my hand.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of will 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 will, 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).
