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would is a verb:

  1. As a past-tense form of .
  2. # Wished, desired (something).
  3. # Wanted to ( + bare infinitive).
  4. #* 1852, James Murdock, trans. Johann Lorenz Mosheim, Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, II.7.iii:
  5. #*: The Greeks, especially those who would be thought adepts in mystic theology, ran after fantastic allegories [...].
  6. # Used to; was or were habitually accustomed to ( + bare infinitive); indicating an action in the past that happened repeatedly or commonly.
  7. #* 2009, "Soundtrack of my life", The Guardian, 15 Mar 09:
  8. #*: When we were kids we would sit by the radio with a tape recorder on a Sunday, listening out for the chart songs we wanted to have.
  9. # Used with bare infinitive to form the "anterior future", indicating a futurity relative to a past time.
  10. #* 1867, Anthony Trollope, Last Chronicle of Barset, ch. 28:
  11. #*: That her Lily should have been won and not worn, had been, and would be, a trouble to her for ever.
  12. # Used with ellipsis of the infinitive verb, or postponement to a relative clause, in various senses.
  13. #* 1724, Daniel Defoe, Roxana, Penguin p. 107:
  14. #*: He sat as one astonish'd, a good-while, looking at me, without speaking a Word, till I came quite up to him, kneel'd on one Knee to him, and almost whether he would or no, kiss'd his Hand [...].
  15. #* 1846, "A New Sentimental Journey", Blackwoods Magazine, vol. LX, no. 372:
  16. #*: If I could fly, I would away to those realms of light and warmth – far, far away in the southern clime [...].
  17. # Was determined to; loosely, could naturally have been expected to (given the tendencies of someone's character etc.).
  18. #* 1835, Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, V:
  19. #*: Then he took to breeding silk-worms, which he would bring in two or three times a day, in little paper boxes, to show the old lady [...].
  20. #* 2009, "Is the era of free news over?", The Observer, 10 May 09:
  21. #*: The free access model, the media magnate said last week, was "malfunctioning". Well he would, wouldn't he?
  22. As a modal verb.
  23. # Used to give a conditional or potential "softening" to the present; might, might wish.
  24. #* 2008, Mark Cocker, "Country Diary", The Guardian, 3 Nov 08:
  25. #*: It's a piece of old folklore for which I would love to find hard proof.
  26. # Used as the auxiliary of the simple conditional mood (with a bare infinitive); indicating an action or state that is conditional on another.
  27. #* 2010, The Guardian, 26 Feb 2010:
  28. #*: Warnock admitted it would be the ideal scenario if he received a Carling Cup winners' medal as well as an England call-up [...].
  29. # Might wish ( + verb in past subjunctive); often used (with or without ) in the sense of "if only".
  30. #* 1859, John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress,
  31. #*: I presently wished, would that I had been in their clothes! would that I had been born Peter! would that I had been born John!
  32. #* 1868, Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ch. 23:
  33. #*: I would she had retained her original haughtiness of disposition, or that I had a larger share of Front-de-Bœuf's thrice-tempered hardness of heart!
  34. # Used to impart a sense of hesitancy or uncertainty to the present; might be inclined to. Now sometimes colloquially with ironic effect.
  35. #* 2009, Nick Snow, The Rocket's Trail, p. 112:
  36. #*: “Those trials are being run by the American army so surely you must have access to the documents?” “Well, yeah, you'd think.”
  37. #* 2010, Terry Pratchett, "My case for a euthanasia tribunal", The Guardian, 2 Feb 2010:
  38. #*: Departing on schedule with the help of a friendly doctor was quite usual. Does that still apply? It would seem so.
  39. # Used interrogatively to express a polite request; are (you) willing to...?
  40. #: Would you pass the salt, please?
  41. # Might desire; wish (something).
  42. #* 1608, William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.4:
  43. #*: What dost thou professe? What would'st thou with vs?

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 would?

As detailed above, 'would' is a verb. There are currently no example sentences for would in this site's database.

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