Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- down can be used as a noun in the sense of "Hill, rolling grassland (such as "Churchill Downs", "Upson Downs" from Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis)." or "Field, especially for racing." or "A single play, from the time the ball is snapped (the start) to the time the whistle is blown (the end) when the ball is down, or is downed." or "Soft, fluffy immature feathers which grow on young birds. Used as insulating material in duvets, sleeping bags and jackets."
- down can be used as a preposition in the sense of "From one end to another; especially, from a higher end to a lower."
- down can be used as a adverb in the sense of "From a higher position to a lower one; downwards." or "At a lower place or position." or "South (as south is at the bottom of typical maps)." or "Away from the city (even if the location is to the North)." or "Into a state of non-operation." or "The direction leading away from the principal terminus, away from milepost zero." or "Get down."
- down can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Depressed, feeling low." or "On a lower level than before." or "With "on", negative about, hostile to" or "With "with", relaxed about, accepting of" or "Inoperable; out of order; out of service." or "Of a task; finished in phrases like"
- down can be used as a verb in the sense of "To drink or swallow, especially without stopping before the vessel containing the liquid is empty." or "To cause to come down." or "To put a ball in a pocket; to pot a ball." or "To bring a play to an end by touching the ball to the ground or while it is on the ground."
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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).
