Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- it can be used as a noun in the sense of "The person or people who chase and try to catch the other players in the playground game of ." or "the game of tag itself." or "IT (used by schoolchildren)."
- it can be used as a abbreviation in the sense of "Italian." or "Italy."
- it can be used as a pronoun in the sense of "The third-person singular personal pronoun used to refer to a non-human entity, to an inanimate thing with no or unknown sex or gender." or "The third-person singular personal pronoun used to refer to a human entity of unknown sex or gender." or "Used to refer to oneself when identifying oneself, often on the phone, but not limited to this situation." or "The impersonal pronoun, used without referent as the subject of an impersonal verb or statement." or "The impersonal pronoun, used as a placeholder for a delayed subject, or less commonly, object."
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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).
