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Word Type

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

  • race can be used as a verb in the sense of "To take part in a race (in the sense of a contest)." or "To move or drive at high speed." or "Of a motor, to run rapidly when not engaged to a transmission."
  • race can be used as a noun in the sense of "A large group of people distinguished from others on the basis of a common heritage." or "A large group of people distinguished from others on the basis of common, genetically linked, physical characteristics, such as skin color or hair type." or "One of the categories from the many subcategorizations of the human species. See Wikipedia's article on historical definitions of race." or "A population geographically separated from others of its species that develops significantly different characteristics; informal for subspecies." or "A breed or strain of domesticated animal." or "A category or species of something that has emerged or evolved from an older one (with an implied parallel to animal breeding or evolutionary science)." or "A contest between people, animals, vehicles, etc. where the goal is to be the first to reach some objective. Several horses run in a horse race, and the first one to reach the finishing post wins; in an arms race several countries each try to acquire more powerful weapons than any other." or "A progressive movement toward a goal." or "A fast moving current of water." or "Travels, runs, or journeys." or "A rhizome, especially of ginger." or "The bushings of a rolling element bearing which contacts the rolling elements."

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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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