Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- roll can be used as a verb in the sense of "To cause to revolve by turning over and over; to move by turning on an axis; to impel forward by causing to turn over and over on a supporting surface." or "To wrap round on itself; to form into a spherical or cylindrical body by causing to turn over and over." or "To bind or involve by winding, as in a bandage; to inwrap; often with up." or "To drive or impel forward with an easy motion, as of rolling." or "To utter copiously, especially with sounding words; to utter with a deep sound; -- often with forth, or out." or "To press or level with a roller; to spread or form with a roll, roller, or rollers." or "To move, or cause to be moved, upon, or by means of, rollers or small wheels." or "To leave or begin a journey." or "To compete, especially with vigor." or "To beat with rapid, continuous strokes, as a drum; to sound a roll upon." or "To apply (one line or surface) to another without slipping; to bring all the parts of (one line or surface) into successive contact with another, in such a manner that at every instant the parts that have been in contact are equal." or "To turn over in one's mind; to revolve." or "To behave in a certain way; to adopt a general disposition toward a situation." or "To throw dice." or "To roll dice such that they form a given pattern or total." or "To have a rolling aspect" or "To create a new character in a role-playing game." or "To generate a random number." or "To turn over and over." or "To tumble in gymnastics." or "when a nautical vessel rotates on its fore-and-aft axis, causing its sides to go up and down. Compare with pitch." or "To beat up." or "To cause to betray secrets of or testify against." or "To betray secrets."
- roll can be used as a noun in the sense of "The act of rolling, or state of being rolled." or "That which rolls; a roller" or "Specifically, a heavy cylinder used to break clods." or "Specifically, one of a set of revolving cylinders, or rollers, between which metal is pressed, formed, or smoothed, as in a rolling mill; as, to pass rails through the rolls." or "That which is rolled up; as, a roll of fat, of wool, paper, cloth, etc." or "Specifically, a document written on a piece of parchment, paper, or other materials which may be rolled up; a scroll." or "Hence, an official or public document; a register; a record; also, a catalogue; a list." or "Specifically, a quantity of cloth wound into a cylindrical form; as, a roll of carpeting; a roll of ribbon." or "Specifically, A cylindrical twist of tobacco." or "A kind of shortened raised biscuit or bread, often rolled or doubled upon itself." or "The oscillating movement of a vessel from side to side, in sea way, as distinguished from the alternate rise and fall of bow and stern called pitching." or "A heavy, reverberatory sound." or "The uniform beating of a drum with strokes so rapid as scarcely to be distinguished by the ear." or "Part; office; duty; rôle." or "A measure of parchments, containing five dozen." or "the rotation angle about the longitudinal axis" or "The act of, or total resulting from, rolling one or more dice." or "The measure of extent to which a nautical vessel rotates on its fore-and-aft axis, causing its sides to go up and down. Compare with pitch."
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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).
