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Word Type

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

  • element can be used as a noun in the sense of "One of the simplest or essential parts or principles of which anything consists, or upon which the constitution or fundamental powers of anything are based." or "Any one of the simplest chemical substances that cannot be decomposed in a chemical reaction or by any chemical means and made up of atoms all having the same number of protons." or "One of the four basic building blocks of matter in theories of ancient philosophers and alchemists: water, earth, fire, and air" or "Something small." or "Atmospheric forces such as strong winds and rains." or "A place or state of being that an individual or object is better suited towards." or "A required aspect or component of a cause of action. A deed is regarded a violation of law only if each element can be proved." or "One of the objects in a set." or "A group of people within a larger group having a particular common characteristic." or "A short form of heating element, a component in electrical equipment, often in the form of a coil, having a high resistance, thereby generating heat when a current is passed through it." or "One of the conceptual objects in a markup language, usually represented in text by a matching pair of tags."

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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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