Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- proper can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Suited or acceptable to the purpose or circumstances; fit, suitable." or "Following the established standards of behavior or manners; correct or decorous." or "Fitting; right." or "Exact; precise." or "In the very strictest sense of the word." or "Used to designate a particular person, place, or thing. Proper words are usually written with an initial capital letter." or "Common or ordinary." or "Belonging to oneself or itself; own." or "Complete or thorough." or "Entitled to its name; true." or "Having its natural or usual coloration, though this is often according to what heraldic convention defines as the natural or usual; proper is considered to be its own tincture." or "utter" or "nontrivial"
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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).
