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Word Type

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

  • plate can be used as a verb in the sense of "To cover the surface material of an object with a thin coat of another material, usually a metal." or "To place the various elements of a meal on the diner's plate prior to serving." or "To perform cunnilingus." or "To score a run."
  • plate can be used as a noun in the sense of "A dish from which food is served or eaten." or "The contents of such a dish." or "A course at a meal." or "A flat metallic object of uniform thickness." or "A vehicle license plate" or "A weighted disk, usually of metal, with a hole in the center for use with a barbell, dumbbell, or exercise machine." or "An engraved surface used to transfer an image to paper." or "An image or copy." or "An illustration in a book, either black and white, or colour, usually on a page of paper of different quality from the text pages." or "A shaped and fitted surface, usually ceramic or metal that fits into the mouth and in which teeth are implanted; a dental plate." or "A horizontal framing member at the top or bottom of a group of vertical studs." or "A decorative or food service item coated with silver." or "A foot, from "plates of meat"." or "Home plate." or "A tectonic plate." or "Plate armour." or "The type of scales covering some kinds of reptile." or "An electrode such as can be found in an accumulator battery, or in an electrolysis tank"

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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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