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Word Type

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

  • crew can be used as a noun in the sense of "A group of people (often staff) manning and operating a large facility or piece of equipment such as a factory, ship, boat or airplane" or "A member of the crew of a vessel or plant" or "A member of a ship's company who is not an officer" or "The group of workers on a dramatic production who are not part of the cast" or "A worker on a dramatic production who is not part of the cast" or "A group of people working together on a task" or "A close group of friends" or "A set of individuals lumped together by the speaker" or "A hip-hop group" or "The sport of competitive rowing" or "A rowing team manning a single shell" or "A pen for livestock such as chickens or pigs"
  • crew can be used as a verb in the sense of "To be a member of a vessel's crew" or "To be a member of a work or production crew" or "To supply workers or sailors for a crew" or "To do the proper work of a sailor" or "To take on, recruit (new) crew" or "To have made the characteristic sound of a rooster."

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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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