Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- abstract can be used as a noun in the sense of "An abridgement or summary." or "Something that concentrates in itself the qualities of something else." or "An abstraction; an abstract term." or "An abstract work of art." or "That which is abstract." or "A powdered solid extract of a vegetable substance mixed with sugar of milk in such proportion that one part of the abstract represents two parts of the original substance."
- abstract can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Extracted." or "Considered apart from any application to a particular object; removed from; apart from; separate; abstracted." or "Absent in mind." or "Apart from practice or reality; not concrete; ideal; vague; theoretical; impersonal." or "Difficult to understand; abstruse." or "Free from representational qualities." or "General (as opposed to particular)." or "Of a class in object-oriented programming, being a partial basis for subclasses rather than a complete template for objects."
- abstract can be used as a verb in the sense of "To separate; to remove; to take away." or "To withdraw." or "(euphemistic) To steal; to take away; to remove without permission." or "To create artistic abstractions of." or "To summarize; to abridge; to epitomize." or "To consider abstractly; to contemplate separately or by itself." or "To draw off (interest or attention)." or "To extract by means of distillation." or "To withdraw oneself; to retire." or "To perform the process of abstraction." or "To produce an abstraction, usually by refactoring existing code. Generally used with "out"."
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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).
