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Word Type

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

  • be can be used as a verb in the sense of "To occupy a place." or "To occur, to take place." or "To exist." or "elliptical form of for "be here", "go to and return from" or similar." or "Used to indicate that the subject and object are the same." or "Used to indicate that the values on either side of an equation are the same." or "Used to indicate that the subject plays the role of the predicate nominal." or "Used to connect a noun to an adjective that describes it." or "Used to indicate that the subject has the qualities described by a noun or noun phrase." or "Used to form the passive voice." or "Used to form the continuous forms of various tenses." or "Used to form the perfect aspect with certain intransitive verbs. Often still used for to go" or "Used to form future tenses, especially the future subjunctive." or "Used to indicate age." or "Used to indicate height." or "Used to indicate time of day, day of the week, or date." or "With since, used to indicate passage of time since the occurrence of an event." or "Used to indicate weather, air quality, or the like." or "Used to indicate temperature."

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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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