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Which can be a pronoun or a determiner.

which used as a pronoun:

  1. Who; whom; what (of those mentioned or implied)
    "He walked by a door with a sign which read: PRIVATE OFFICE."

A pronoun is a placeholder for a noun. Examples of pronouns are: them, he, they, it. Pronouns make sentences shorter and clearer since they replace nouns. For example, instead of saying 'Emily was happy, so Emily smiled.' you can say 'Emily was happy, so she smiled.' Learn more →

which used as a determiner:

  1. What, of those mentioned or implied (used interrogatively).
    "Which song made the charts?"
  2. What one or ones (of those mentioned or implied).
    "Which is bigger?"
  3. The one or ones that.
    "Show me which one is bigger."
  4. the one mentioned
    "For several seconds he sat in silence, during which time the tea and sandwiches arrived."
  5. Used of people (now generally , or ).
    "Thanks be unto god, which hath given us victory."

Determiners are a special kind of describing word used with nouns. In the sentence "Some people don't eat animals." the determiner "some" modifies the "people" noun so that refers specifically to a subset of people. In the sentence "The person doesn't eat animals." the determiner "the" modifies the "person" noun so it refers to a specific person that would be evident if we had more context. Learn more →

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What type of word is which?

As detailed above, 'which' can be a pronoun or a determiner. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Pronoun usage: He walked by a door with a sign which read: PRIVATE OFFICE.
  2. Pronoun usage: Their first song, which made the charts in 2004, is great.
  3. Pronoun usage: We've met some problems which are very difficult to handle.
  4. Pronoun usage: He had to leave, which was very difficult.
  5. Pronoun usage: We have to protect the environment in which we live.
  6. Pronoun usage: No art can be properly understood apart from the culture of which it is a part.
  7. Determiner usage: Which song made the charts?
  8. Determiner usage: Which is bigger?
  9. Determiner usage: Which is which?
  10. Determiner usage: Show me which one is bigger.
  11. Determiner usage: They couldn't decide which song to play.
  12. Determiner usage: For several seconds he sat in silence, during which time the tea and sandwiches arrived.
  13. Determiner usage: I'm thinking of getting a new car, in which case I'd get a red one.
  14. Determiner usage: Thanks be unto god, which hath given us victory.
  15. Determiner usage: There were six sons, of which he was the youngest.

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