Word.ws English Dictionary

pos

UK/pɒz/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Australia/pɔz/

pos is the clipping of positive.

pos is the alternative spelling of poz.

pos is the clipping of possessive.

pos is the plural of po.

Meaning of positive

Adjective

positive (comparative more positive, superlative most positive)

  1. Included, present, characterized by affirmation.
  2. Formally laid down.
    • In laws, that which is natural bindeth universally; that which is positive, not so.1594, Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie
  3. Stated definitively and without qualification.
    • Positive words, that he would not bear arms against King Edward’s son.1622, Francis, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Alban [i.e. Francis Bacon], The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh, […], London: […] W[illiam] Stansby for Matthew Lownes, and William Barret...
  4. Fully assured in opinion.
    • I’m absolutely positive you've spelt that wrong.
    Synonyms:
    certain, sure, wis
    Antonyms:
    uncertain, unsure
  5. Greater than zero.
  6. (sometimes) Greater than or equal to zero.
    • Notice that each time the calculator balance becomes positive (zero or greater), the dollar item that forces this balance to become positive is selected for examination. Since each of these dollar items is contained […]1987, Roger H. Hermanson, Robert H. Strawser, Auditing Theory and Practice^(https://books.google.com/books?id=Vh7yAAAAMAAJ&q=%22positive+(zero+or+greater%22&dq=%22positive+(zero+or+greater%22&hl=en&ne...
    Synonyms:
    nonnegative

See all 32 meanings of positive

Meaning of poz

Adjective

poz (not comparable)

  1. (LGBTQ slang) HIV positive.
    • Her test results were poz.
    Synonyms:
    pozzed
    Antonyms:
    neg

See all 3 meanings of poz

Noun (1) capitalized: POS

POS (countable and uncountable, plural POSes or POSs)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of proof of service.
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of peripheral oxygen saturation.
  3. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of part of speech.
    • Eight POSs are defined in traditional English grammar: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.2009, Mirjam Sepesy Maučec, Zdravko Kačič, “Statistical Modelling of Highly Inflective Languages”, in Juan Ramón Rabuñal Dopico, Julián Dorado de la Calle, Alejandro Pazos Sierra, editors...
    • To include part-of-speech (POS) information, the corpus was tagged using the CLAWS tagger.2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary...
  4. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of point of sale or point of service.
  5. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of proprietary operating system.
  6. (abbreviation, initialism, navigation) Initialism of position and orientation system.
  7. (abbreviation, initialism, vulgar) Initialism of piece of shit.
    • Unlimited technology from the whole universe, and we cruise 'round in a Ford P.O.S.1997, Ed Solomon, Men in Black, spoken by Agent J (Will Smith)
    • Everything you lost was because you are a P.O.S,^([sic]) […]2011, Sarreta “Whispers” Lopez, “I Have Recognized My Worth”, in I Have Arrived, AuthorHouse, →ISBN, page 69
  8. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of Parinaud's oculoglandular syndrome.

Phrase capitalized: POS

POS

  1. (Internet, abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of parent over shoulder (i.e. observing the young user's conversation).
    • Hang on, POS ... can you tell me about it later?

Noun (2) capitalized: PoS

PoS (plural PoSes or PoSs)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of part of speech.
    • It should be noted that there is not always a perfect match between the logically possible systems displayed above and the PoS systems actually encountered in the sample languages. As the data in the next sub-section will show, languages may display an additional PoS class from a ‘neighboring’...2010, Kees Hengeveld, Eva van Lier, “Parts of speech and dependent clauses in Functional Discourse Grammar”, in Umberto Ansaldo, Jan Don, Roland Pfau, editors, Parts of Speech: Empirical and...
    • Consequently, a good PoS tagger should be able to reach a degree of precision which goes beyond the superficial level of Noun/Verb/Adjective/Adverb/Grammar words.2011, Samuel Cruz-Lara, Tarik Osswald, Jordan Guinaud, Nadia Bellalem, Lotfi Bellalem, Jean-Pierre Camal, “A Chat Interface Using Standards for Communication and e-Learning in Virtual Worlds”, in...
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of proof of stake.

Noun (3) capitalized: POs

POs

  1. (plural) plural of PO

Forms of pos

Adjective
comparativemore pos
superlativemost pos
Noun
pluralPOSes
pluralPOSs
pluralPoSes
pluralPoSs

Words formed from pos

Phrases with pos

Questions about pos

What is pos the clipping of?
Pos is the clipping of positive.
What part of speech is pos?
Pos can be a noun or a phrase.
How do you pronounce pos?
Pos is pronounced /pɒz/ (UK).
What is the plural of pos?
The plural of pos is POSes.

Words near pos in the dictionary

  1. porwigles
  2. pory
  3. porzelky
  4. Porzio
  5. Porzios
  6. pos
  7. pos pron
  8. pos prons
  9. POS terminal
  10. POS terminals
  11. posable

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pos (page history and authors); POS (page history and authors); PoS (page history and authors); POs (page history and authors); positive (page history and authors); poz (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Persent101-pos.wav, En-au-POS.ogg.

Cite this entry: “pos.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pos. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.