Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- hack can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Having or requiring little talent."
- hack can be used as a verb in the sense of "To chop or cut down in a rough manner." or "To cough noisily." or "To withstand or put up with a difficult situation." or "To hack into; to gain unauthorized access to a computer system (e.g. website) or network by manipulating code; a crack." or "To accomplish a difficult programming task." or "To make a quick code change to patch a computer program." or "To work on an intimately technical level." or "To strike an opponent's leg with one's hockey stick." or "A flailing attempt to hit the puck with a hockey stick." or "To swing at a pitched ball." or "To lay (bricks) on a rack to dry." or "To keep (young hawks) in a state of partial freedom, before they are trained." or "To make common or cliched; to vulgarise." or "To ride a horse at a regular pace; to ride on a road (as opposed to riding cross-country etc.)." or "To play hackeysack."
- hack can be used as a noun in the sense of "A hacking blow." or "A gouge or notch made by such a blow." or "The foothold traditionally cut into the ice from which the person who throws the rock pushes off for delivery." or "A mattock or a miner's pick." or "A dry cough." or "An illegal attempt to gain access to a computer network." or "An interesting technical achievement, particularly in computer programming." or "A small code change meant to patch a problem as quickly as possible." or "An expedient, temporary solution, meant to be replaced with a more elegant solution at a later date." or "Time check." or "A swing of the bat at a pitched ball by the batter." or "A board which the falcon's food is placed on; used by extension for the state of partial freedom in which they are kept before being trained." or "A food-rack for cattle." or "A rack used to dry bricks." or "An ordinary horse, especially an old, tired one." or "A taxicab (hackney cab) driver." or "One who is professionally successful despite producing mediocre work. (Usually applied to persons in a creative field.)" or "A talented writer-for-hire, paid to put others' thoughts into felicitous language." or "An untalented writer." or "A political agitator. (slightly derogatory)" or "A small ball usually made of woven cotton or suede and filled with rice, sand or some other filler, for the use in hackeysack."
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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).
