Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- laker can be used as a noun in the sense of "A ship used on the Great Lakes." or "#Salt water sailor's definition: an ocean going vessel that is small enough to navigate the locks and canals of the St. Lawrence Seaway to enable it to reach ports on the Great Lakes of the United States of America (On the Great Lakes these are called "salties".)" or "#St. Lawrence Seaway sailor's definition: a vessel that is too large for the Seaway (including the Welland Canal portion) and is therefore restricted to the upper Great Lakes (Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior)" or "#Great Lakes sailor's definition: a vessel that is built for and used primarily on the Great Lakes, especially those used for bulk cargoes (bulk carrier) While large enough to be considered "ships", Great Lakes sailors have always referred to their steam or motor powered vessels as "boats"." or "##Classic laker: a bulk carrier designed with above deck cabins for pilothouse and officers' quarters at the bow and cabins for engines and crew quarters at the stern with open decks and hatchways spaced at 24 foot centers over the hold(s). Because the most common bulk cargo has historically been iron ore, these vessels are commonly known on the Great Lakes as "ore boats" regardless of what is actually in the hold at the time." or "###Straight decker: a classic laker with no self-unloading equipment" or "##Stern-ender: a vessel with all above deck cabins located at the stern" or "##Whaleback: a variation on laker design built from 1887 to 1898" or "A wharfman who resides near a lake."
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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).
