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Word Type

Work can be a noun or a verb.

work used as a noun:

  1. Labour, employment, occupation, job.
    "My work involves a lot of travel."
  2. The place where one is employed.
    "He hasn’t come home yet, he’s still at work."
  3. Effort expended on a particular task.
    "Holding a brick over your head is hard work."
  4. A measure of energy expended in moving an object; most commonly, force times distance. No work is done if the object does not move.
    "Work is done against friction to drag a bag along the ground."
  5. A nonthermal First Law energy in transit between one form or repository and another. Also, a means of accomplishing such transit..
  6. A literary, artistic, or intellectual production.
    "It is a work of art."
  7. A fortification.
    "William the Conqueror fortified many castles, throwing up new ramparts, bastions and all manner of works."
  8. The staging of events to appear as real.

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 →

work used as a verb:

  1. To do a specific task by employing physical or mental powers.
    "He’s working in a bar."
  2. # Followed by in. Said of one's workplace (building), or one's department, or one's trade (sphere of business).
  3. #*: I work in a national park.
  4. #*: She works in the human resources department.
  5. #*: He mostly works in logging, but sometimes works in carpentry.
  6. # Followed by as. Said of one's job title
  7. #*: I work as a cleaner.
  8. # Followed by for. Said of a company or individual who employs.
  9. #*: She works for Microsoft.
  10. #*: He works for the president.
  11. # Followed by with. General use, said of either fellow employees or instruments or clients.
  12. #*: I work closely with my Canadian counterparts.
  13. #*: I work with computers.
  14. #*: I work with the homeless people from the suburbs.
  15. To effect by gradual degrees.
    "He worked his way through the crowd."
  16. To embroider with thread.
  17. To set into action.
    "He worked the levers."
  18. To cause to ferment.
  19. To exhaust, by working.
    "the mine was worked until the last scrap of ore had been extracted."
  20. To shape, form, or improve a material.
    "He used pliers to work the wire into shape."
  21. To operate in a certain place, area, or speciality.
    "She works the night clubs."
  22. To operate in or through; as, to work the phones.
  23. To provoke or excite; to influence.
    "The rock musician worked the crowd of young girls into a frenzy."
  24. To use or manipulate to one's advantage.
    "She knows how to work the system."
  25. To cause to happen or to occur as a consequence.
    "I cannot work a miracle."
  26. To cause to work.
    "He is working his servants hard."
  27. To function correctly; to act as intended; to achieve the goal designed for.
    "He pointed at the car and asked, "Does it work"?"
  28. (figuratively) To influence.
    "They worked on her to join the group."
  29. To effect by gradual degrees; as, to work into the earth.
  30. To move in an agitated manner.
    "His fingers worked with tension."
  31. To behave in a certain way when handled;
    "This dough does not work easily."

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 →

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What type of word is work?

As detailed above, 'work' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: My work involves a lot of travel.
  2. Noun usage: He hasn’t come home yet, he’s still at work.
  3. Noun usage: Holding a brick over your head is hard work.
  4. Noun usage: It takes a lot of work to write a dictionary.
  5. Noun usage: Work is done against friction to drag a bag along the ground.
  6. Noun usage: It is a work of art.
  7. Noun usage: William the Conqueror fortified many castles, throwing up new ramparts, bastions and all manner of works.
  8. Verb usage: He’s working in a bar.
  9. Verb usage: He worked his way through the crowd.
  10. Verb usage: The dye worked its way through.
  11. Verb usage: He worked the levers.
  12. Verb usage: the mine was worked until the last scrap of ore had been extracted.
  13. Verb usage: He used pliers to work the wire into shape.
  14. Verb usage: She works the night clubs.
  15. Verb usage: The salesman works the Midwest.
  16. Verb usage: This artist works mostly in acrylics.
  17. Verb usage: The rock musician worked the crowd of young girls into a frenzy.
  18. Verb usage: She knows how to work the system.
  19. Verb usage: I cannot work a miracle.
  20. Verb usage: He is working his servants hard.
  21. Verb usage: He pointed at the car and asked, "Does it work"?
  22. Verb usage: He looked at the bottle of pain pills, wondering if they would work.
  23. Verb usage: My plan didn’t work.
  24. Verb usage: They worked on her to join the group.
  25. Verb usage: His fingers worked with tension.
  26. Verb usage: This dough does not work easily.
  27. Verb usage: The soft metal works well.

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