Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- plant can be used as a verb in the sense of "To place (a seed or plant) in soil or other substrate in order that it may live and grow." or "To place (an object, or sometimes a person), often with the implication of intending deceit." or "To place or set something firmly or with conviction."
- plant can be used as a noun in the sense of "An organism that is not an animal, especially an organism capable of photosynthesis. Typically a small or herbaceous organism of this kind, rather than a tree." or "An organism of the kingdom Plantae; now specifically, a living organism of the Embryophyta (land plants) or of the Chlorophyta (green algae), a eukaryote that includes double-membraned chloroplasts in its cells containing chlorophyll a and b, or any organism closely related to such an organism." or "Now specifically, a multicellular eukaryote that includes chloroplasts in its cells, which have a cell wall." or "A factory or other industrial or institutional building or facility." or "An object placed surreptitiously in order to cause suspicion to fall upon a person." or "Anyone assigned to behave as a member of the public during a covert operation (as in a police investigation)." or "A person, placed amongst an audience, whose role is to cause confusion, laughter etc." or "A play in which the cue ball knocks one (usually red) ball onto another, in order to pot the second; a set." or "A large piece of machinery, such as used in earthmoving or road construction."
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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).
