Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- fast can be used as a verb in the sense of "To abstain from or eat very little food; to abstain from food for religious reasons."
- fast can be used as a noun in the sense of "The act or practice of abstaining from food or of eating very little food." or "The period of time during which one abstains from or eats very little food." or "A train that calls at only some stations it passes between its origin and destination, typically just the principal stations."
- fast can be used as a adverb in the sense of "In a firm or secure manner, securely; in such a way as not to be moved." or "Deeply or soundly." or "Immediately following in place or time; close, very near." or "Quickly, with great speed; within a short time." or "Ahead of the correct time or schedule."
- fast can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Firmly or securely fixed in place; stable." or "Of people: steadfast, with unwavering feeling. (Now only in set phrases like "fast friend".)" or "Moving with great speed, or capable of doing so; swift, rapid." or "Deep or sound (of sleep); fast asleep (of people)." or "Of dyes or colours: not running or fading when subjected to detrimental conditions such as wetness or intense light; permanent." or "Having an extravagent lifestyle or immoral habits." or "Ahead of the correct time or schedule." or "More sensitive to light than average."
- fast can be used as a interjection in the sense of "Short for "stand fast", a warning not to pass between the arrow and the target."
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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).
