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Word Type

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

  • appeal can be used as a verb in the sense of "To accuse (someone of something)." or "To apply for the removal of a cause from an inferior to a superior judge or court for the purpose of reexamination of for decision. --Tomlins. WP" or "To call upon another to decide a question controverted, to corroborate a statement, to vindicate one's rights, etc.; as, I appeal to all mankind for the truth of what is alleged. Hence: To call on one for aid; to make earnest request." or "To be attractive; as, that idea appeals to me means I find the idea attractive." or "To ask an umpire for a decision of whether a batsman is out or not"
  • appeal can be used as a noun in the sense of "(a) An application for the removal of a cause or suit from an inferior to a superior judge or court for reëxamination or review. (b) The mode of proceeding by which such removal is effected. (c) The right of appeal. (d) An accusation; a process which formerly might be instituted by one private person against another for some heinous crime demanding punishment for the particular injury suffered, rather than for the offense against the public. (e) An accusation of a felon at common law by one of his accomplices, which accomplice was then called an approver. --Tomlins. --Bouvier." or "A summons to answer to a charge. --John Dryden." or "A call upon a person or an authority for proof or decision, in one's favor; reference to another as witness; a call for help or a favor; entreaty." or "Resort to physical means; recourse." or "The power to attract or interest" or "the act, by the fielding side, of asking an umpire for a decision of whether a batsman is out or not."

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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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