Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- diaphragm can be used as a verb in the sense of "To reduce lens aperture using an optical diaphragm." or "To act as a diaphragm, for example by vibrating."
- diaphragm can be used as a noun in the sense of "In mammals, a sheet of muscle separating the thorax from the abdomen, contracted and relaxed in respiration to draw air into and expel air from the lungs; also called thoracic diaphragm." or "Any of various membranes or sheets of muscle or ligament which separate one cavity from another." or "A contraceptive device consisting of a flexible cup, used to cover the cervix during intercourse." or "A flexible membrane separating two chambers and fixed around its periphery that distends into one or other chamber depending on the as the difference in the pressure in the chambers varies." or "In a speaker, the thin, semi-rigid membrane which vibrates to produce sound." or "A thin opaque structure with a central aperture, used to limit the passage of light into a camera or similar device." or "A permeable or semipermeable membrane" or "A floor slab, metal wall panel, roof panel or the like, havig a sufficiently large in-plane shear stiffness and sufficient strength to transmit horizontal forces to resisting systems."
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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).
