There is a tweet I posted (dated 30 October 2018) in which I put forth the sentence “can you keep this secret?” and ask “Is the word ‘secret’ a noun or an adjective?” when technically both answers can be right. But, for the sake of an attempt to address the barriers associated with language learning/mastery (from an original angle), go and find a dictionary and learn a new word (whatever that may be; that said I would suggest a good old-fashioned paper one rather than an online one, for is it not true that the latter are pretty much always used only to look up specific individual words? Especially given the chance of them being spelt incorrectly by the one looking them up; they can just expect them to be automatically corrected!). But it just seems to me that sometimes it’s not even always that easy to denote what category of the word a given word is (i.e. noun, adjective, whatever), much as I understand that, in the case of English at least, e.g. plenty of words ending in “-ous” will be adjectives, plenty of words ending in “-ed” will be verbs (in their past tense / past participle form) and plenty of words ending in “-ly” will be adverbs. So if your mother tongue is English, I invite you to play a little game here. Look at this choice collection of little-known words and have a guess as to what category they all are (without looking them up until afterwards!). Please also accept that I had a bit of a challenge on my hands not selecting words that would likely be known by those who can call themselves experts in a certain field (one such word I would eventually reject as “gneiss”, a type of metamorphic rock; geologists will know what this is even if they have never come across any first-hand). The answers are available via the link provided – the definitions given are provided by Google.
- Munificent
2. Ochre
3. Imbibe
4. Abreast
5. Chunter
6. Fain
7. Portend
8. Lambast
9. Jocund
10. Mendicant
Answers: https://www.facebook.com/GeorgeTrailTranslator/posts/2979690272121024?__tn__=K-R-R