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Word Type

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

  • frog can be used as a verb in the sense of "To unravel a knitted garment." or "To ornament or fasten a coat, etc. with frogs." or "To hunt or trap frogs."
  • frog can be used as a noun in the sense of "A small hopping amphibian." or "A fastener for clothing consisting of a button that fits through a loop." or "The part of a violin bow (or that of other similar string instruments such as the viola, cello and contrabass) located at the end held by the player, to which the horsehair is attached." or "Road. Shorter, more common form of frog and toad." or "A French person." or "A French-speaking person from Quebec." or "The depression in the upper face of a pressed or handmade clay brick." or "An organ on the bottom of a horse's hoof that assists in the circulation of blood." or "The part of a railway switch or turnout where the tracks cross (from the resemblance to the frog in a horse's hoof)." or "A leather or fabric loop used to attach a sword or bayonet, or its scabbard, to a waist or shoulder belt."

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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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