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Word Type

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

  • beam can be used as a verb in the sense of "To transmit matter or information via a high-tech wireless mechanism." or "To smile broadly or especially cheerfully."
  • beam can be used as a noun in the sense of "Any large piece of timber or iron long in proportion to its thickness, and prepared for use." or "One of the principal horizontal timbers of a building; one of the transverse members of a ship's frame on which the decks are laid - supported at the sides by knees in wooden ships and by stringers in steel ones." or "The maximum width of a vessel; as, one vessel is said to have more beam than another; also called breadth. (FM 55-501)." or "The crossbar of a mechanical balance, from the ends of which the scales are suspended." or "The principal stem of the antler of a deer." or "The pole of a carriage." or "A cylinder of wood, making part of a loom, on which weavers wind the warp before weaving; also, the cylinder on which the cloth is rolled, as it is woven; one being called the fore beam, the other the back beam." or "The straight part or shank of an anchor." or "The central bar of a plow, to which the handles and colter are secured, and to the end of which are attached the oxen or horses that draw it." or "A heavy iron lever having an oscillating motion on a central axis, one end of which is connected with the piston rod from which it receives motion, and the other with the crank of the wheel shaft; -- called also working beam or walking beam." or "A ray or collection of parallel rays emitted from the sun or other luminous body; as, a beam of light, or of heat." or "A ray; a gleam; as, a beam of comfort." or "One of the long feathers in the wing of a hawk; -- called also beam feather." or "A horizontal bar which connects the stems of two or more notes to group them and to indicate metric value."

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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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