Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- cross can be used as a preposition in the sense of "across"
- cross can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Transverse; lying across the main direction." or "Opposite, opposed to." or "Opposing, adverse; being contrary to what one would hope or wish for." or "Bad-tempered, angry, annoyed."
- cross can be used as a verb in the sense of "To mark with an X." or "To go from one side of (something) to the other." or "To travel in a direction or path that will intersect with that of another." or "To contradict (another) or frustrate the plans of." or "(reflexive to cross oneself) To make the sign of the cross over oneself." or "Of both batsmen, to pass each other when running between the wickets in order to score runs." or "to cross-fertilize or crossbreed" or "to conduct a cross examination; to question a hostile witness" or "To pass the ball from one side of the pitch to the other side."
- cross can be used as a noun in the sense of "A geometrical figure consisting of two straight lines or bars intersecting each other such that at least one of them is bisected by the other." or "Any geometric figure having this or a similar shape, such as a cross of Lorraine or a Maltese cross." or "A wooden post with a perpendicular beam attached and used (especially in the Roman Empire) to execute criminals (by crucifixion)." or "(usually with the) The cross on which Christ was crucified." or "A hand gesture made by Catholics in imitation of the shape of the Cross." or "A modified representation of the crucifixion stake, worn as jewellery or displayed as a symbol of religious devotion." or "(figurative, from Christ's bearing of the cross) A difficult situation that must be endured." or "Animal or plant produced by crossbreeding or cross-fertilization." or "a hook thrown over the opponent's punch" or "A kick in which the ball travels from one side of the pitch to the other" or "A place where roads intersect and lead off in four directions; a crossroad (common in UK and Irish place names such as Gerrards Cross)." or "A monument that marks such a place. (Also common in UK or Irish place names such as Charing Cross)"
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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).
