Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- pile can be used as a verb in the sense of "To drive piles into; to fill with piles; to strengthen with piles." or "To lay or throw into a pile or heap; to heap up; to collect into a mass; to accumulate; to amass; — often with up; as, to pile up wood." or "To cover with heaps; or in great abundance; to fill or overfill; to load." or "To add something to a great number." or "(of vehicles) To create a hold-up."
- pile can be used as a noun in the sense of "A dart; an arrow." or "The head of an arrow or spear." or "A large stake, or piece of pointed timber, steel etc., driven into the earth or sea-bed for the support of a building, a pier, or other superstructure, or to form a cofferdam, etc." or "One of the ordinaries or subordinaries having the form of a wedge, usually placed palewise, with the broadest end uppermost." or "A hemorrhoid." or "A mass of things heaped together; a heap" or "A mass formed in layers; as, a pile of shot." or "A funeral pile; a pyre." or "A large building, or mass of buildings." or "A bundle of pieces of wrought iron to be worked over into bars or other shapes by rolling or hammering at a welding heat; a fagot." or "A vertical series of alternate disks of two dissimilar metals, as copper and zinc, laid up with disks of cloth or paper moistened with acid water between them, for producing a current of electricity; — commonly called Volta's pile, voltaic pile, or galvanic pile." or "The reverse (or tails) of a coin." or "Hair, especially when very fine or short; the fine underfur of certain animals. (Formerly countable, now treated as a collective singular.)" or "The raised hairs, loops or strands of a fabric; to nap of a cloth."
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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).
