Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- reason can be used as a verb in the sense of "To exercise the rational faculty; to deduce inferences from premises; to perform the process of deduction or of induction; to ratiocinate; to reach conclusions by a systematic comparison of facts." or "Hence: To carry on a process of deduction or of induction, in order to convince or to confute; to formulate and set forth propositions and the inferences from them; to argue." or "To converse; to compare opinions." or "To arrange and present the reasons for or against; to examine or discuss by arguments; to debate or discuss." or "To support with reasons, as a request." or "To persuade by reasoning or argument." or "To overcome or conquer by adducing reasons; — with down." or "To find by logical process; to explain or justify by reason or argument; — usually with out."
- reason can be used as a noun in the sense of "A cause:" or "# That which causes something: an efficient cause, a proximate cause." or "#: The reason this tree fell is that it had rotted." or "#* 1996, Daniel Clement Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, page 198," or "#*: There is a reason why so many should be symmetrical: The selective advantage in a symmetrical complex is enjoyed by all the subunits" or "# A motive for an action or a determination." or "#: The reason I robbed the bank was that I needed the money." or "#* 1806, [Anonymous], Select Notes to Book XXI, in, Alexander Pope, translator, The Odyssey of Homer, volume 6, London, F.J. du Roveray, page 37," or "#*: This is the reason why he proposes to offer a libation, to atone for the abuse of the day by their diversions." or "#* 1881, Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, chapter 10," or "#*: Ralph Touchett, for reasons best known to himself, had seen fit to say that Gilbert Osmond was not a good fellow." or "# An excuse: a thought or a consideration offered in support of a determination or an opinion; that which is offered or accepted as an explanation." or "#* 1966, Graham Greene, The Comedians, Penguin Classics edition, ISBN 0140184945, page 14," or "#*: I have forgotten the reason he gave for not travelling by air. I felt sure that it was not the correct reason, and that he suffered from a heart trouble which he kept to himself." or "# proof, more or less decisive, for an opinion or a conclusion" or "The cognitive faculties, collectively, of conception, judgment, reasoning, and intuition; the ability to think." or "Something reasonable, in accordance with thought; justice." or "due exercise of the reasoning faculty" or "ratio; proportion."
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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).
