Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- runner can be used as a noun in the sense of "Agent noun of run; somebody who runs." or "A quick escape away from a scene." or "A type of soft-soled shoe originally intended for runners, cf trainer; a sneaker." or "A part of an apparatus that moves quickly" or "A mechanical part intended for wheels to run on or to slide against another surface." or "A strip of fabric used to decorate a table." or "A long, narrow carpet for a high traffic area such as a hall or stairs." or "(scuffleball) a forward playing position." or "a player who runs for a batsman who is too injured to run; he is dressed exactly as the injured batsman, and carries a bat." or "A player who runs the bases." or "A person (from one or the other team) who runs out onto the field during the game to take verbal instructions from the coach to the players. A runner mustn't interfere with play, and may have to wear an identifying shirt to make clear his or her purpose on the field." or "A part of a cigarette that is burning unevenly." or "A long stolon sent out by a plant (such as strawberry), in order to root new plantlets."
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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).
