Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- internal combustion engine can be used as a noun in the sense of "A piston or a rotary heat engine directly powered by the products of intermittent combustion of a fuel." or "A heat engine in which intermittent or the continuous burning of a fuel takes place inside a combustion chamber; the resulting pressurized gas acts directly on the engine to do useful work, such as a piston engine, gas turbine, jet engine or rocket.[http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.britannica.com%2Feb%2Farticle-9106036%2Finternal-combustion-engine&ei=ZdJqSMCnDo_o0gXitpynDA&usg=AFQjCNE6h_t0H7XJLKnUjudcNQjmgMeUdg&sig2=srdZH3-tM_JIU9y7-Q0H6Q]"
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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).
