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Word Type

This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.

  • mole can be used as a noun in the sense of "A pigmented spot on the skin, a naevus, slightly raised, and sometimes hairy." or "Any of several small, burrowing insectivores of the family Talpidae." or "Any of the burrowing rodents also called mole rats." or "An internal spy, a person who involves himself or herself with an organization to determine its secrets from within." or "Bitch, spiteful female.— Australian variant of the word "moll", altered in spelling due to contamination with the above meaning ("spy", "sneaky person"), and due to /mɒl/ and /məʊl/ merging as [moʊl] in the Australian accent. The original spelling ("moll") can also be used in this sense." or "A massive structure, usually of stone, used as a pier, breakwater or junction between places separated by water." or "A haven or harbour, protected with a breakwater." or "In the International System of Units, the base unit of amount of substance; the amount of substance of a system which contains as many elementary entities as there are atoms in 0.012 kg of carbon-12. Symbol: mol. The number of atoms is known as Avogadro's number" or "A hemorrhagic mass of tissue in the uterus caused by a dead ovum." or "A sauce containing chocolate and used in cooking of Mexico and neighboring Central America."

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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).

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