This sentence was on a vocab test in my school. (I am the librarian and saw the test as a kid was sitting in here doing makeups)
Name the part of speech of the underlined word:
The contaminate that was found in the computer program was a virus that had caused may problems for other companies as well.
What is your answer?
I say noun, or adverb. It describes the virus.
Noun, but I’ve never heard of a computer virus being called a ‘contaminate’ before. Someone was trying to be clever and failed.
Noun, but I think the word they really want is “contaminant.”
As it’s written, it’s used as a noun, but it is incorrect usage, because the noun form is “contaminant”. “Contaminate” is also listed in my dictionary as an adjective but only as archaic usage.
They may have been thinking about an analogy with “precipitate”, which is a legitimate noun.
Is there any evidence of using “contaminate” as a verb in real scientific writing, or in a dictionary? Even if such a word exists, I would doubt it would be a legitimate part of a seventh grade curriculum, at least in the US. The standard word is “contaminant”.
I also agree that it sounds awkward to speak of a computer being contaminated. I usually think of contaminants as unwanted chemicals in a substance. I could see it used metaphorically in other cases where some type of “substance” is seen as unwanted and that results in spoilation, but using it to refer to a replicating organism-like entity seems to be too much of a stretch to be good English.
It’s a noun. You could replace it with an X or a blank and it would still be a noun. Whatever you put in that spot in the sentence is a noun, even if it is a word that usually functions as another part of speech. Since English has gotten increasingly comfortable with words being used as any part of speech (known as the buffification of language—or it should be, anyway), I think it’s a good idea for tests to give kids non-conventional usages to parse, though in this case I think the test writer just used the wrong word there. Still, I’m ok with it. True, verbing weirds language, and so does nouning, but they also embiggen it.
It’s a dumb sentence, it’s a noun, and the writer meant “contaminant”. Contaminate is a a verb.
Yeah, you are confirming what I thought. And depressing me as well. This kid was taking a makeup test, after everyone else is presumably done, and no one questioned this.
Contaminate may be either noun or verb.
Yeah, noun.
Lop off the dependent clauses and you get:
The contaminate was a virus.
It is modified by a definite article, which only modifies nouns or noun-phrases.
It is the subject of the sentence – the nominative to the predicate ‘was.’
If the test-writer was being too clever and intended ‘contaminate’ to be a reversed-word-order predicate-adjective, like the word ‘red’ is in this sentence: “The ball was red,” Then the test-writer is an idiot. Even in that case ‘contaminate’ would be a substantive-adjective, which is… a noun.
But I also agree with the above that ‘contaminate’ is the wrong word, it should be ‘contaminant’… unless the OP is misremembering the word.
Very few dictionaries agree with that assessment.
Your cite cites Burton’s Legal Thesaurus, 4E. Copyright © 2007 by William C. Burton. Used with permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
I don’t think the OP was in a legal context.
TheAmerican Heritage dictionary lists it as a noun, synonymous with contaminant.
I agree.
The use of “the” (definite article?) preceding it instantly marks it as a noun, since there is no other noun for “the” to modify.
I also believe they misspoke and meant contaminant. I have never ever heard “contaminate” used in that way, as a noun. you can use “predicate”, or “precipitate”, but usually that refers (I think) to a whole, not a component. As one component of a mixture (by its definition), it would seen the word is contaminant.
No self-respecting computer hacker (or 7th grader) would use the word “contaminate” in this case unless they were mocking clueless 7th-grade teachers.
I meant to cite the regular dictionary, where the word is also listed as both noun and verb:
I don’t recall ever seeing it used as a noun. Can anyone provide an example of a published, competently-written work in which the word “contaminate” appears as a noun?
However, I agree with Alan Smithee that, regardless of what the word is or whether it was used correctly, it had the role of a noun in the OP’s sentence.
Another member cited the American Heritage Dictionary.
The following Google page cites one concur:
for a total of 3/9 first page cites.
By the way, I hope the bolded word was the OP’s typo, and not the test’s.