Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- mirliton can be used as a noun in the sense of "A buzzword created to refer to and advertise a new women's bonnet style (AKA "coiffure de gaze" as seen in the early 19th century French painting Portrait De Jeune Femme (En Coiffure De Gaze) by Henri Pierre-Louis Grevedon [http://www.chapitre.com/CHAPITRE/fr/PAINT/grevedon-pierre-louis-1776-1860-henri-dit/portrait-de-jeune-femme-en-coiffure-de-gaze,5815459.aspx see here]) of 1723 involving a gauzy cloth or net for which the word was invented. Within months, comedies of the time created songs and verses using the new word to make light of political and social leaders. The word gained the meaning sense as a catch-all phrase such that it might refer to any silly trifle or thing of little value or merit as in the English word folderol. From there, it acquired more serious, specific usages." or "A pear-shaped vegetable or its vine, also known as the chayote (Spanish) or w:christophene (French). This usage is cajun or Creole and thus regional to Louisiana." or "A class of w:musical instruments with a membrane that vibrates in the manner of that of a kazoo or the w:eunuch flute. Can also refer to the membrane itself (see w:List of musical instruments by Hornbostel-Sachs number). Can refer to other crude musical instruments such as a penny trumpet. It can refer to other toy pipes and noisemakers which produce harsh musical sounds. The French term "mirliton", which appeared in 1745 (possibly originating in a popular song refrain), was a kind of simple children's flute adorned with a spiral of paper." or "An 18th century hussar hat similar to a peak-less (American English: visor-less) and slightly conical shako or tall fez. It usually featured a long cloth trail or wing (Flügel) attached to one side, often wrapped about the hat when the wing was not on display. This kind of hat was used until in the middle of the w:Napoleonic Wars. In German, the precise word for this concept is [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%BCgelm%C3%BCtze Flügelmütze]. See also w:Totenkopf." or "A company that makes metal w:miniature figures near Florence, Italy, or the miniatures themselves." or "A small town in central Haiti (Trou Mirliton)" or "The title of a movement in w:The Nutcracker Ballet, Danse Des Mirlitons, referring either to the flute duet in the music or to the reed-pipes (or perhaps eunuch flute) that the depicted shepherdesses might have played to their flocks. The term is often used to refer to the role of the shepherdess dancer. A further pun might refer to the marzipan that the dance represents and the almonds used in Mirliton pastries." or "A tube-shaped pastry imitative of the shape of a short toy flute (This shape is now more closely associated with a toy siren whistle)." or "A tartlet or biscuit garnished with almond, first produced in Rouen around 1800." or "The popular refrain to a song. Used in this sense, a cabaret opened in 1885 by w:Aristide Bruant in Paris. The intended pun is that mirliton literally in German slang means doggerel." or "The French expression "Vers de mirliton" referring to any bad poetry where its artistic merit has been sacrificed for the sake of getting the verse to rhyme." or "A comic book cat character created by the French cartoonists w:Raymond Macherot (drawing) and Raoul Cauvin (story). A character in older French literature named Mirliton would be a clownish charlatan, much as a mirliton might be dismissed as a pseudomusical instrument." or "The common name for a version of the gold "Louis d’or" coin made during Louis XV's reign. Why mirliton? Perhaps: on the back of coin are two letter "L"'s facing and overlapping with each other; the stylized L's are cursive and their line tapers, as if made of ribbon." or "A railroad sign used on the french w:SNCF network. It typical is a long rectangle with broad diagonal black stripes."
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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).
