Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- barb can be used as a verb in the sense of "To furnish with barbs, or with that which will hold or hurt like barbs, as an arrow, fishhook, spear, etc." or "(Corrupt) To cover a horse in armor, corrupted from bard." or "To shave or dress the beard of." or "To clip; to mow."
- barb can be used as a noun in the sense of "The point that stands backward in an arrow, fishhook, etc., to prevent it from being easily extracted. Hence: Anything which stands out with a sharp point obliquely or crosswise to something else." or "A beard, or that which resembles it, or grows in the place of it." or "(Corrupt) Armor for a horse, corrupted from bard." or "One of the side branches of a feather, which collectively constitute the vane." or "Several species of freshwater fish of the Cyprinid family." or "A southern name for the kingfishes of the eastern and southeastern coasts of the United States; -- also improperly called whiting." or "A hair or bristle ending in a double hook." or "A blackish or dun variety of the pigeon, originally brought from Barbary." or "A muffler, worn by nuns and mourners." or "Paps, or little projections, of the mucous membrane, which mark the opening of the submaxillary glands under the tongue in horses and cattle. The name is mostly applied when the barbs are inflamed and swollen. [Written also barbel and barble.]" or "A bit for a horse." or "The Barbary horse, a superior breed introduces from Barbary into Spain by the Moors."
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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).
