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API libraries provide thousands of APIs, and are essential in daily programming tasks. To understand their usages, it has long been a hot research topic to mine specifications that formally define legal usages for APIs. Furthermore, researchers are working on many other research topics on APIs. Although the research on APIs is intensively studied, many fundamental questions on APIs are still open. For example, the answers to open questions, such as which format can naturally define API usages and in which case, are still largely unknown. We notice that many such open questions are not concerned with concrete usages of specific APIs, but usages that describe how to use different types of APIs. To explore these questions, in this paper, we conduct an empirical study on API usages, with an emphasis on how different types of APIs are used. Our empirical results lead to nine findings on API usages. For example …