Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- float can be used as a noun in the sense of "A buoyant device used to support something in water or another liquid." or "A tool similar to a rasp, used in various trades" or "A sort of trowel used for finishing concrete surfaces." or "An elaborately decorated trailer or vehicle, intended for display in a parade or pageant." or "A small battery-powered vehicle used for local deliveries, especially in the term milk float." or "Funds committed to be paid but not yet paid." or "An offering of shares in a company (or units in a trust) to members of the public, normally followed by a listing on a stock exchange." or "The total amount of checks/cheques or other drafts written against a bank account but not yet cleared and charged against the account." or "Premiums taken in but not yet paid out." or "Short form of floating-point number." or "A soft beverage with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream floating in it." or "A small sum of money put in a cashier's till at the start of business to enable change to be made."
- float can be used as a verb in the sense of "Of an object or substance, to be supported by a liquid of greater density than the object so as that part of the object or substance remains above the surface." or "To be capable of floating." or "To drift gently through the air." or "To drift or wander aimlessly." or "To move in a particular direction with the liquid in which one is floating" or "To move in a fluid manner." or "To automatically adjust a parameter as related parameters change." or "(of currencies) To have an exchange value determined by the markets as opposed to by rule." or "(of an idea or scheme) To be viable." or "To cause something to be suspended in a liquid of greater density; as, to float a boat." or "To propose (an idea) for consideration." or "To extend a short-term loan to." or "To allow (the exchange value of a currency) to be determined by the markets." or "To issue or sell shares in a company (or units in a trust) to members of the public, followed by listing on a stock exchange." or "To use a float (tool)."
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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).
