Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- center can be used as a verb in the sense of "To cause (an object) to occupy the center of an area." or "To cause (some attribute, such as a mood or voltage) to be adjusted to a value which is midway between the extremes." or "To concentrate on (something), to pay close attention to (something)."
- center can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Of, at, or related to a center."
- center can be used as a noun in the sense of "The middle portion of something; the part well away from the edges." or "The point on a line that is midway between the ends." or "The point in the interior of a circle that is equidistant from all points on the circumference of the circle." or "The point in the interior of a sphere that is equidistant from all points on the surface of the sphere." or "The point in the interior of any figure of any number of dimensions that has as its coordinates the arithmetic mean of the coordinates of all points on the perimeter of the figure (or of all points in the interior for a center of volume)." or "A place where some function or activity occurs." or "A topic that is particularly important in a given context." or "The player, generally the tallest, who plays closest to the basket." or "The forward that generally plays between the left wing and right wing and usually takes the faceoffs." or "The person who holds the ball at the beginning of each play."
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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).
