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Word Type

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

  • blade can be used as a noun in the sense of "The sharp cutting edge of a knife, chisel, or other tool, a razor blade." or "The flat functional end of a propeller, oar, hockey stick, screwdriver, skate, etc." or "The narrow leaf of a grass or cereal." or "The thin, flat part of a plant leaf, attached to a stem (petiole). The lamina." or "A flat bone, especially the shoulder blade." or "A cut of beef from near the shoulder blade (part of the chuck)." or "The flat part of the tongue." or "A sword or knife." or "A piece of prepared, sharp-edged stone, often flint, at least twice as long as it is wide; a long flake of ground-edge stone or knapped vitreous stone." or "A throw characterized by a tight parabolic trajectory due to a steep lateral attitude." or "The rudder, daggerboard, or centerboard of a vessel." or "A bulldozer or surface-grading machine with mechanically adjustable blade that is nominally perpendicular to the forward motion of the vehicle." or "A dashing young man." or "A homosexual, usually male." or "Thin plate, foil."
  • blade can be used as a verb in the sense of "To skate on rollerblades."

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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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