Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- comb can be used as a noun in the sense of "A toothed implement for grooming the hair." or "A machine used in separating choice cotton fibers from worsted cloth fibers." or "A fleshy growth on the top of the head of some birds and reptiles; crest." or "A structure of hexagon cells made by bees for storing honey; honeycomb." or "An old English measure of corn equal to the half quarter." or "The top part of a gun's stock." or "the toothed plate at the top and bottom of an escalator that prevents objects getting trapped between the moving stairs and fixed landings." or "the main body of a harmonica containing the air chambers and to which the reed plates are attached."
- comb can be used as a abbreviation in the sense of "combination"
- comb can be used as a verb in the sense of "To groom the hair with a toothed implement." or "To separate choice cotton fibers from worsted cloth fibers." or "To search thoroughly as if raking over an area with a comb."
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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).
