Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- boiler can be used as a noun in the sense of "An apparatus that generates heat (usually by burning fuel) and uses it to heat circulating water (or sometimes another liquid) in a closed system that is then used for space heating, swimming pool heating, or domestic hot water or industrial processes." or "Less commonly, a hot water heater." or "(approximate definition) A fuel burning apparatus in which water is boiled to produce steam for space heating, power generation, or industrial processes. (more precisely) An apparatus in which a heat source other than a hot liquid or steam (most commonly burning fuel, exhaust gas from an internal combustion engine or gas turbine, waste heat from a process, solar energy or electricity) is used to boil water (or rarely another liquid), under pressure to provide steam (or other gas) for use as a heat source in calorifiers, heat exchangers or heat emitters, or for use directly for humidification, in an industrial process, or to power steam turbines." or "a kitchen vessel for steaming or boiling food"
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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).
