WordType Logo

Word Type

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

  • brace can be used as a verb in the sense of "To prepare for something bad, as an impact or blow. All hands, brace for impact!" or "To swing round the yards of a square rigged ship, using braces, to present a more efficient sail surface to the direction of the wind" or "To stop someone for questioning, usually said of police" or "To confront with questions, demands or requests"
  • brace can be used as a noun in the sense of "Armor for the arm; vambrace." or "A measurement of length, originally representing a person's outstretched arms." or "A curved instrument or handle of iron or wood, for holding and turning bits, etc.; a bitstock." or "That which holds anything tightly or supports it firmly; a bandage or a prop." or "A cord, ligament, or rod, for producing or maintaining tension" or "A thong used to regulate the tension of a drum." or "A vertical curved line ('{' or '}') connecting two or more words or lines, which are to be taken together; thus, boll, bowl; or, in music, used to connect staves." or "A pair, a couple; originally used of dogs, and later of animals generally and then other things. (The plural in this sense is unchanged.))" or "A piece of material used to transmit, or change the direction of, weight or pressure; any one of the pieces, in a frame or truss, which divide the structure into triangular parts. It may act as a tie, or as a strut, and serves to prevent distortion of the structure, and transverse strains in its members. A boiler brace is a diagonal stay, connecting the head with the shell." or "A rope reeved through a block at the end of a yard, by which the yard is moved horizontally; also, a rudder gudgeon." or "The mouth of a shaft." or "(usually plural) Straps or bands to sustain trousers; suspenders." or "(usually plural) A system of wires, brackets, and elastic bands used to correct crooked teeth."

Related Searches

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).

Recent Queries