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Word Type

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

  • buzz can be used as a noun in the sense of "A continuous, humming noise, as of bees; a confused murmur, as of general conversation in low tones, or of a general expression of surprise or approbation." or "A whisper; a report spread secretly or cautiously." or "The audible friction of voice consonants." or "A rush or feeling of energy or excitement." or "A telephone call."
  • buzz can be used as a verb in the sense of "To make a low, continuous, humming or sibilant sound, like that made by bees with their wings. Hence: To utter a murmuring sound; to speak with a low, humming voice." or "To sound forth by buzzing." or "To whisper; to communicate, as tales, in an under tone; to spread, as report, by whispers, or secretly." or "To talk to incessantly or confidentially in a low humming voice." or "To fly very low over an airport or other location."

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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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