Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- gas can be used as a noun in the sense of "Matter in a state intermediate between liquid and plasma that can be contained only if it is fully surrounded by a solid (or held together by gravitational pull); it can condense into a liquid, or can (rarely) become a solid directly." or "A chemical element or compound in such a state." or "An inflammable gaseous hydrocarbon or hydrocarbon mixture (typically predominantly methane) used as a fuel, e.g. for cooking, heating or electricity generation." or "Methane or other waste gases trapped in one's belly as a result of the digestive process." or "A humorous or entertaining event or person." or "A fastball." or "Gasoline; a derivative of petroleum used as fuel."
- gas can be used as a verb in the sense of "To kill with poisonous gas." or "To talk, chat." or "To emit gas." or "To give a vehicle more fuel in order to accelerate it." or "To fill (a vehicle's fuel tank) with fuel"
- gas can be used as a adjective in the sense of "comical, zany."
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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).
