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Wit can be a verb or a noun.

wit used as a verb:

  1. Know, be aware of .
    "You committed terrible actions — to wit, murder and theft — and should be punished accordingly."

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 →

wit used as a noun:

  1. Sanity.
    "He's gone completely out of his wits?"
  2. The senses.
  3. Intellectual ability; faculty of thinking, reasoning.
    "Where she has gone to is beyond the wit of man to say."
  4. The ability to think quickly; mental cleverness, especially under short time constraints.
    "My father had a quick wit and a steady hand."
  5. Intelligence; common sense.
    "The opportunity was right in front of you, and you didn't even have the wit to take it!"
  6. Spoken humour, especially when clever or quick.
    "The best man's speech was hilarious, full of wit and charm."
  7. A person who tells funny anecdotes or jokes; someone witty.
    "Your friend is quite a wit, isn't he?"

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 →

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What type of word is wit?

As detailed above, 'wit' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: You committed terrible actions — to wit, murder and theft — and should be punished accordingly.
  2. Verb usage: They are meddling in matters that men should not wit of.
  3. Noun usage: He's gone completely out of his wits?
  4. Noun usage: Where she has gone to is beyond the wit of man to say.
  5. Noun usage: My father had a quick wit and a steady hand.
  6. Noun usage: The opportunity was right in front of you, and you didn't even have the wit to take it!
  7. Noun usage: The best man's speech was hilarious, full of wit and charm.
  8. Noun usage: Your friend is quite a wit, isn't he?

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