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Word Type

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

  • head can be used as a verb in the sense of "To be in command of. - see also head up" or "To strike with the head; as in soccer, to head the ball" or "To move in a specified direction. heading towards something" or "To remove the head from a fish."
  • head can be used as a noun in the sense of "The part of the body of an animal or human which contains the brain, mouth and main sense organs." or "Mental or emotional aptitude or skill." or "Mind; one's own thoughts." or "The topmost, foremost, or leading part." or "The end of a rectangular table furthest from the entrance; traditionally considered a seat of honor." or "The end of a pool table opposite the end where the balls have been racked." or "The principal operative part of a machine." or "The end of a hammer, axe, or similar implement used for striking other objects." or "The end of a nail, screw, bolt or similar fastener which is opposite the point; usually blunt and relatively wide." or "The sharp end of an arrow, spear, or pointer." or "The source of a river; the end of a lake where a river flows into it." or "The front, as of a queue." or "Headway; progress." or "The foam that forms on top of beer or other carbonated beverages." or "The top part of a lacrosse stick that holds the ball." or "Leader; chief; mastermind." or "A headmaster or headmistress." or "A headache; especially one resulting from intoxication." or "A clump of leaves or flowers; a capitulum." or "The rounded part of a bone fitting into a depression in another bone to form a ball-and-socket joint." or "An individual person." or "A single animal." or "the population of game" or "Topic; subject." or "A morpheme that determines the category of a compound or the word that determines the syntactic type of the phrase of which it is a member." or "The principal melody or theme of a piece." or "Deposits near the top of a geological succession." or "The end of an abscess where pus collects." or "denouement; crisis" or "A machine element which reads or writes electromagnetic signals to or from a storage medium." or "The headstock of a guitar." or "A drum head, the membrane which is hit to produce sound." or "The end cap of a cylindrically-shaped pressure vessel." or "The cylinder head, a platform above the cylinders in an internal combustion engine, containing the valves and spark plugs." or "A buildup of fluid pressure, often quantified as pressure head." or "The difference in elevation between two points in a column of fluid, and the resulting pressure of the fluid at the lower point." or "More generally, energy in a mass of fluid divided by its weight." or "The top of a sail." or "The bow of a nautical vessel." or "The toilet of a ship." or "Fellatio or cunnilingus; oral sex" or "The glans penis." or "A heavy or habitual user of illicit drugs." or "a headland."
  • head can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Of, relating to, or intended for the head." or "Foremost in rank or importance." or "Placed at the top or the front." or "Coming from in front."

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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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