Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- mean can be used as a noun in the sense of "An intermediate step or intermediate steps." or "The average, the arithmetic mean." or "Loosely, an intermediate value or range of values; a mid-value; a vague average." or "Any function of multiple variables that satisfies certain properties and yields a number representative of its arguments; or, the number so yielded; a measure of central tendency." or "Either of the two numbers in the middle of a conventionally presented proportion, as 2 and 3 in 1:2=3:6."
- mean can be used as a verb in the sense of "To convey, signify, or indicate." or "To want or intend to convey." or "To intend; to plan on doing." or "To have conviction in what one says." or "To have intentions of a some kind." or "To result in; to bring about."
- mean can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Causing or intending to cause intentional harm; bearing ill will towards another; cruel; malicious." or "Miserly; stingy." or "Selfish; acting without consideration of others; unkind." or "Powerful; fierce; harsh; damaging." or "Accomplished with great skill; deft; hard to compete with." or "Low in quality; inferior." or "Having the mean (see noun below) as its value."
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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).
