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Word Type

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

  • complex can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Made up of multiple parts; intricate or detailed." or "Not simple or straightforward." or "Of a number, of the form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is the square root of −1." or "A curve, polygon or other figure that crosses or intersects itself."
  • complex can be used as a verb in the sense of "To form a complex with another substance"
  • complex can be used as a noun in the sense of "A problem." or "A collection of buildings with a common purpose, such as a university or military base." or "A psychologically based dislike or fear of a particular thing." or "A thunderstorm that forms when two storm fronts collide." or "A structure consisting of a central atom or molecule weakly connected to surrounding atoms or molecules."

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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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