Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- block can be used as a noun in the sense of "A substantial, often approximately cuboid, piece of any substance." or "A cuboid of wood, plastic or other material used as a base on which to cut something." or "A group of urban lots of property, several acres in extent, not crossed by public streets" or "A group of buildings in a city or town, demarcated by streets." or "The distance from one street to another in a city that is built (approximately) to a grid pattern." or "The human head." or "A set of sheets (of paper) joined together at one end." or "A logical data storage unit containing one or more physical sectors (see cluster)." or "A region of code in a program that acts as a single unit, such as a function or loop." or "A case with one or more sheaves/pulleys, used with ropes to increase or redirect force, for example, as part of the rigging of a sailing ship." or "A portion of a macromolecule, comprising many units, that has at least one feature not present in adjacent portions." or "Something that prevents something from passing (see blockage)." or "An action to interfere with the movement of an opposing player or of the object of play (ball, puck)." or "A shot played by holding the bat vertically in the path of the ball, so that it loses momentum and drops to the ground." or "A defensive play by one or more players meant to deflect a spiked ball back to the hitter's court." or "A joined group of four (or in some cases nine) postage stamps, forming a roughly square shape."
- block can be used as a verb in the sense of "To fill (something) so that it is not possible to pass." or "To prevent (something or someone) from passing." or "To prevent (something from happening or someone from doing something)." or "To impede an opponent in sports." or "To specify the positions and movements of the actors." or "To hit with a block." or "To play a block shot." or "To refuse to communicate with somebody by telephone, instant messaging, etc." or "To wait."
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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).
