Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- light can be used as a verb in the sense of "To start (a fire)." or "To illuminate." or "To unload a ship, or to jettison material to make it lighter" or "To find by chance." or "To alight."
- light can be used as a noun in the sense of "The natural medium emanating from the sun and other very hot sources (now recognised as electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of 400-750 nm), within which vision is possible." or "A source of illumination." or "Spiritual or mental illumination; enlightenment, useful information." or "Facts. pieces of information; ideas, concepts." or "A notable person within a specific field or discipline." or "A point of view, or aspect from which a concept, person or thing is regarded." or "A flame or something used to create fire." or "A window, or space for a window in architecture" or "The series of squares reserved for the answer to a crossword clue" or "A cross-light in a double acrostic or triple acrostic." or "A stone that is not thrown hard enough."
- light can be used as a adjective in the sense of "having light" or "pale in colour" or "served with extra milk or cream" or "Of low weight; not heavy." or "Lightly-built; designed for speed or small loads." or "Gentle; having little force or momentum." or "Low in fat, calories, alcohol, salt, etc." or "Unimportant, trivial, having little value or significance." or "Unchaste, wanton."
- light can be used as a adverb in the sense of "Carrying little."
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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).
