Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- car can be used as a noun in the sense of "A wheeled vehicle, drawn by a horse or other animal" or "A wheeled vehicle that moves independently, steered by a driver mostly for personal transportation; a motor car or automobile" or "An unpowered unit in a railroad train." or "an individual vehicle, powered or unpowered, in a multiple unit." or "A passenger-carrying unit in a subway or elevated train, whether powered or not." or "A rough unit of quantity approximating the amount which would fill a railroad car." or "The moving, load-carrying component of an elevator or other cable-drawn transport mechanism." or "The passenger-carrying portion of certain amusement park rides, such as Ferris wheels." or "The part of an airship, such as a balloon or dirigible, which houses the passengers and control apparatus." or "A sliding fitting that runs along a track." or "The aggregate of desirable characteristics of a car."
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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).
