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Word Type

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

  • pan can be used as a verb in the sense of "To wash in a pan (of earth, sand etc. when searching for gold)." or "To disparage; to belittle; to put down; to criticise severely." or "With "out" (to pan out), to turn out well; to be successful." or "To beat one's opposition convincingly." or "To turn horizontally (of a camera etc.)." or "To move the camera lens angle while continuing to expose the film, enabling a contiguous view and enrichment of context. In still-photography large-group portraits the film usually remains on a horizontal fixed plane as the lens and/or the film holder moves to expose the film laterally. The resulting image may extend a short distance laterally or as great as 360 degrees from the point where the film first began to be exposed."
  • pan can be used as a noun in the sense of "A wide, flat receptacle used around the house, especially for cooking." or "The contents of such a receptacle." or "A cylindrical receptacle about as tall as it is wide, with one long handle, usually made of metal, used for cooking in the home." or "A wide receptacle in which gold grains are separated from gravel by washing the contents with water." or "a specific type of lake, natural depression or basin. They are sometimes associated with desert areas." or "Strong adverse criticism." or "A loaf of bread." or "The base part of a toilet, consisting of a bowl and a footing. [http://www.caroma.com.au/products/index.html]" or "A human face, a mug." or "The bottom flat part of a roofing panel that is between the ribs of the panel."

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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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