WordType Logo

Word Type

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

  • hook can be used as a noun in the sense of "A rod bent into a curved shape, typically with one end free and the other end secured to a rope or other attachment." or "A fishhook, a barbed metal hook used for fishing." or "Any of various hook-shaped agricultural implements such as a billhook" or "A loop shaped like a hook under certain written letters, e.g. g and j." or "A catchy musical phrase which forms the basis of a popular song." or "A brief, punchy opening statement intended to draw the reader or viewer into a book or play." or "Removal or expulsion from a group or activity." or "A type of shot played by swinging the bat in a horizontal arc, hitting the ball high in the air to the leg side, often played to balls which bounce around head height." or "A curveball." or "A feature, definition, or coding that enables future enhancements to happen compatibly or more easily." or "A golf shot that (for the right-handed player) curves unintentionally to the left. See draw, slice, fade" or "A basketball shot in which the offensive player, usually turned perpendicular to the basket, gently throws the ball with a sweeping motion of his arm in an upward arc with a follow-through which ends over his head. Also called hook shot." or "A type of punch delivered with the arm rigid and partially bent and the fist travelling nearly horizontally mesially along an arc." or "A jack (the playing card)"
  • hook can be used as a verb in the sense of "To attach a hook to." or "To catch with a hook (hook a fish)." or "To connect (hook into, hook together)." or "hook up: To meet." or "hook up: To have sexual intercourse with." or "(Usually in passive) To make addicted (I'm hooked)." or "To play a hook shot." or "To engage in the illegal maneuver of hooking (i.e., using the hockey stick to trip or block another player)" or "To engage in prostitution."

Related Searches

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).

Recent Queries