Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- launch can be used as a noun in the sense of "The act of launching." or "The movement of a vessel from land into the water; especially, the sliding on ways from the stocks on which it is built. (Compare: to splash a ship.)" or "The boat of the largest size and/or of most importance belonging to a ship of war, and often called the "captain's boat" or "captain's launch"." or "A boat used to convey guests to and from a yaucht." or "An open boat of any size powered by steam, naphtha, electricity, or the like. (Compare Spanish lancha.)"
- launch can be used as a verb in the sense of "To throw, as a lance or dart; to hurl; to let fly; to take off, propel with force" or "To strike with, or as with, a lance; to pierce." or "To cause to move or slide from the land into the water; to set afloat; as, to launch a ship." or "To send out; to start (one) on a career; to set going; to give a start to (something); to put in operation." or "To move with force and swiftness like a sliding from the stocks into the water; to plunge; to make a beginning; as, to launch into the current of a stream; to launch into an argument or discussion; to launch into lavish expenditures."
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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).
