Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- floater can be used as a noun in the sense of "Agent noun of float; one who floats." or "An employee of a company who does not have fixed tasks to do but fills in wherever needed, usually when someone else is away." or "A threadlike speck in the visual field that seems to move, possibly caused by degeneration of the vitreous humour." or "An "extra" male at a dinner party, or a young friend of the hostess, whose assignment is to entertain the female guests." or "(insurance) A policy covering property at more than one location or which may be in transit." or "(police jargon) A floating corpse picked up from a body of water." or "An unaffiliated player." or "A maneuver in which a surfer transitions above the unbroken face of the wave onto the lip, or on top of the breaking section of the wave." or "A piece of faeces that floats." or "A coin which does not spin when thrown in the air." or "Someone who attaches themselves to a group of people, much to the dismay of that group, and repeatedly shows up to participate in group activities despite attempts to get rid of, or “flush,” that person."
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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).
