Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- backhand can be used as a verb in the sense of "to execute a backhand stroke or throw" or "to slap with the back of one's hand"
- backhand can be used as a noun in the sense of "a stroke made across the chest from the off-hand side to the racquet hand side; a stroke during which the back of the hand faces the shot." or "Handwriting that leans to the left" or "the standard throw; a throw during which the disc begins on the off-hand side and travels across the chest to be released from the opposite side."
- backhand can be used as a adjective in the sense of "(handwriting) any left slanting handwriting" or "(of strokes or throws) in the backhand style" or "Any play that uses the back side of the hockey stick"
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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).
