WordType Logo

Word Type

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

  • active can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Having the power or quality of acting; causing change; communicating action or motion; acting; — opposed to passive, that receives; as, certain active principles; the powers of the mind." or "Quick in physical movement; of an agile and vigorous body; nimble; as, an active child or animal." or "In action; actually proceeding; working; in force; — opposed to quiescent, dormant, or extinct." or "Given to action; constantly engaged in action; energetic; diligent; busy; — opposed to dull, sluggish, indolent, or inert; as, an active man of business; active mind; active zeal." or "Requiring or implying action or exertion; — opposed to sedentary or to tranquil; as, active employment or service; active scenes." or "Given to action rather than contemplation; practical; operative; — opposed to speculative or theoretical; as, an active rather than a speculative statesman." or "Brisk; lively; as, an active demand for corn." or "Implying or producing rapid action." or "Applied to a form of the verb; — opposed to passive. See active voice." or "Applied to verbs which assert that the subject acts upon or affects something else; transitive." or "Applied to all verbs that express action as distinct from mere existence or state." or "enjoying a role in anal sex in which he penetrates, rather than being penetrated by his partner" or "such a role in anal sex"
  • active can be used as a noun in the sense of "A person or thing that is acting or capable of acting."

Related Searches

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).

Recent Queries