Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- handle can be used as a noun in the sense of "A part of an object which is held in the hand when used or moved, as the haft of a sword, the knob of a door, the bail of a kettle, etc." or "That of which use is made; an instrument for effecting a purpose; a tool." or "The gross amount of wagering within a given period of time or for a given event at one of more establishments." or "A topological space homeomorphic to a ball but viewed as a product of two lower-dimensional balls." or "A name, nickname or pseudonym. [Originally Cornish-American, from Cornish hanough, later hanow (pronounced han'of or han'o) = name]" or "A 10 fl oz (285 ml) glass of beer in the Northern Territory. See also pot, middy for other regional variations." or "A reference to an object or structure that can be stored in a variable."
- handle can be used as a verb in the sense of "To use the hands." or "To touch; to feel with the hand." or "To use or hold with the hand." or "To manage in using, as a spade or a musket; to wield; often, to manage skillfully." or "To accustom to the hand; to work upon, or take care of, with the hands." or "To receive and transfer; to have pass through one's hands; hence, to buy and sell; as, a merchant handles a variety of goods, or a large stock" or "To deal with; to make a business of." or "To treat; to use, well or ill." or "To manage; to control; to practice skill upon." or "To use or manage in writing or speaking; to treat, as a theme, an argument, or an objection."
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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).
