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Word Type

This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.

  • accent can be used as a verb in the sense of "To express the accent of (either by the voice or by a mark); to utter or to mark with accent." or "To mark emphatically; to emphasize; to accentuate." or "To mark with written accents."
  • accent can be used as a noun in the sense of "A higher or stronger articulation of a particular syllable of a word or phrase in order to distinguish it from the others or to emphasize it." or "A mark or character used in writing, in order to indicate the place of the spoken accent, or to indicate the nature or quality of the vowel marked." or "Modulation of the voice in speaking; the manner of speaking or pronouncing; a peculiar or characteristic modification of the voice, expressing emotion; tone; as, a foreign accent; a French or a German accent." or "A nonstandard way of pronouncing." or "A word; a significant tone or sound." or "Expressions in general; speech." or "Stress laid on certain syllables of a verse." or "A regularly recurring stress upon the tone to mark the beginning, and, more feebly, the third part of the measure." or "A special emphasis of a tone, even in the weaker part of the measure." or "The rhythmical accent, which marks phrases and sections of a period." or "The expressive emphasis and shading of a passage." or "A mark placed at the right hand of a letter, and a little above it, to distinguish magnitudes of a similar kind expressed by the same letter, but differing in value, as y', y." or "A mark at the right hand of a number, indicating minutes of a degree, seconds, etc., as in "12' 27", meaning twelve minutes and twenty-seven seconds." or "A mark used to denote feet and inches, as in "6' 10", meaning six feet ten inches." or "Paint, wallpaper, or similar coating that contrasts with the surroundings."

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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).

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