Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- degree can be used as a noun in the sense of "A step on a set of stairs; the rung of a ladder." or "An individual step, or stage, in any process or scale of values." or "A stage of rank or privilege; social standing." or "A ‘step' in genealogical descent." or "One's relative state or experience; way, manner." or "The amount that an entity possesses a certain property; relative intensity, extent." or "A stage of proficiency or qualification in a course of study, now especially an award bestowed by a university or, in some countries, a college, as an indication of academic achievement." or "A unit of measurement of angle equal to 1/360 of a circle's circumference." or "A unit of measurement of temperature on any of several scales, such as Celsius or Fahrenheit." or "The sum of the exponents of a term; the order of a polynomial." or "The number of edges that a vertex takes part in; a valency." or "The curvature of a circular arc, expressed as the angle subtended by a fixed length of arc or chord."
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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).
