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Word Type

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

  • dock can be used as a verb in the sense of "To land at a harbour." or "To join two moving items." or "To cut off a section of an animal's tail." or "To reduce wages; to deduct." or "To drag a user interface element (such as a toolbar) to a position on screen where it snaps into place."
  • dock can be used as a noun in the sense of "A fixed structure attached to shore to which a vessel is secured when in port." or "The body of water between two piers or wharves." or "A burdock plant, or the leaves of that plant." or "Any plant in the genus Rumex." or "Part of a courtroom where accused sits." or "A section of a hotel or restaurant, as in coffee dock" or "The root of an animal's tail, also what remains after the tail has been docked." or "(also doc) the buttocks or anus." or "A device designed as a base for holding a connected portable appliance such as a laptop computer (in this case, referred to as a docking station), or a mobile telephone, for providing the necessary electrical charge for its autonomy, or as a hardware extension for additional capabilities." or "A toolbar that provides the user with a way of launching applications, and switching between running applications"

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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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