Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- cradle can be used as a verb in the sense of "To contain in or as if in a cradle." or "To rock (a baby to sleep)." or "To wrap protectively." or "To rock the lacrosse stick back and forth in order to keep the ball in the head by means of centrifugal force."
- cradle can be used as a noun in the sense of "A bed or cot for a baby, oscillating on rockers or swinging on pivots." or "The place of origin, or in which anything is nurtured or protected in the earlier period of existence." or "Infancy, or very early life." or "An implement consisting of a broad scythe for cutting grain, with a set of long fingers parallel to the scythe, designed to receive the grain, and to lay it evenly in a swath." or "A tool used in mezzotint engraving, which, by a rocking motion, raises burrs on the surface of the plate, so preparing the ground." or "A framework of timbers, or iron bars, moving upon ways or rollers, used to support, lift, or carry ships or other vessels, heavy guns, etc., as up an inclined plane, or across a strip of land, or in launching a ship." or "A case for a broken or dislocated limb." or "A frame to keep the bedclothes from contact with the sensitive parts of an injured person." or "A machine on rockers, used in washing out auriferous earth." or "A suspended scaffold used in shafts." or "A ribbing for vaulted ceilings and arches intended to be covered with plaster." or "A basket or apparatus in which, when a line has been made fast to a wrecked ship from the shore, the people are brought off from the wreck." or "A rest for the receiver of a telephone."
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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).
