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Word Type

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

  • key can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Indispensable." or "Important, salient."
  • key can be used as a verb in the sense of "To fit (a lock) with a key." or "To fit (pieces of a mechanical assembly) with a key to maintain the orientation between them." or "(telegraphy and radio telegraphy) To depress (a telegraph key)." or "(radio) To operate (the transmitter switch of a two-way radio)." or "(more usually to key in) To enter (information) by typing on a keyboard or keypad." or "To vandalize (a car, etc.) by scratching with an implement such as a key." or "To link (as one might do with a key or legend)." or "To mark or indicate with a symbol indicating membership in a class."
  • key can be used as a noun in the sense of "An object designed to open and close a lock." or "An object designed to fit between two other objects (such as a shaft and a wheel) in a mechanism and maintain the orientation between them." or "A crucial step or requirement." or "A guide explaining the symbols or terminology of a map or chart; a legend." or "One of several small, usually square buttons on a typewriter or computer keyboard, most of which generally correspond to a particular character." or "One of a number of rectangular moving parts on a piano or musical keyboard, each causing a particular sound or note to be produced." or "One of various levers on a musical instrument used to select notes, such as a lever opening a hole on a woodwind." or "A hierarchical scale of musical notes on which a composition is based" or "A device used to transmit Morse code." or "A piece of information (e.g. a passphrase) used to encode or decode a message or messages." or "In a relational database, a field used as an index into another table (not necessarily unique)." or "A value that uniquely identifies an entry in an associative array." or "The free-throw lane together with the circle surrounding the free-throw line, the free-throw lane having formerly been narrower, giving the area the shape of a skeleton key hole." or "kilogram" or "One of a string of small islands."

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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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