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Word Type

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

  • muzzle can be used as a noun in the sense of "the protruding part of many animal's head which includes nose, mouth and jaws; snout" or "the mouth or the end for entrance or discharge of a gun, pistol etc., that the bullet emerges from as opposed to the breech" or "a device used to prevent animal from biting or eating, which is worn on its head" or "a piece of the forward end of the plow-beam by which the traces are attached; bridle" or "an openwork covering for the nose, used for the defense of the horse, and forming part of the bards in the 15th and 16th centuries"
  • muzzle can be used as a verb in the sense of "to bind or confine animal's mouth by putting a muzzle, as to prevent it from eating or biting" or "to restrain (from speaking, expressing opinion or acting); gag, silence" or "to veil, mask, muffle" or "to fondle with the closed mouth; to nuzzle" or "to bring the muzzle or mouth near"

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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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