Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- dragon can be used as a noun in the sense of "A legendary, serpentine or reptilian creature." or "# (Western) A gigantic beast, typically reptilian with leathery bat-like wings, lion-like claws, scaly skin and a serpent-like tail, often a monster with fiery breath." or "#* c.1900 — Edith Nesbit, The Last of the Dragons" or "#*: But as every well-brought-up prince was expected to kill a dragon, and rescue a princess, the dragons grew fewer and fewer till it was often quite hard for a princess to find a dragon to be rescued from." or "# (Eastern) A large, snake-like lizard with the eyes of a hare, the horns of a stag and the claws of a tiger, usually benefic" or "#* 1913 — Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, ch XIII" or "#*: These tapestries were magnificently figured with golden dragons; and as the serpentine bodies gleamed and shimmered in the increasing radiance, each dragon, I thought, intertwined its glittering coils more closely with those of another." or "Certain animal species which resemble a dragon in appearance:" or "# A very large snake; a python." or "# A lizard of the genus Draco." or "# The Komodo dragon." or "The constellation Draco." or "An unpleasant woman; a harridan." or "(absolute use, often capitalized: "the Dragon") The nickname for the Chinese empire and People's Republic of China" or "(figuratively) Something very formidable or dangerous."
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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).
