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Word Type

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

  • sack can be used as a noun in the sense of "A bag; especially a large bag of strong, coarse material for storage and handling of various commodities, such as potatoes, coal, coffee; or, a bag with handles used at a supermarket, a grocery sack; or, a small bag for small items, a satchel." or "The amount a sack holds; also, an archaic or historical measure of varying capacity, depending on commodity type and according to local usage; an old English measure of weight, usually of wool, equal to 13 stone (182 pounds), or in other sources, 26 stone (364 pounds)." or "The plunder and pillaging of a captured town or city." or "Loot or booty obtained by pillage." or "A successful tackle of the quarterback. See verb sense3 below." or "One of the square bases anchored at first base, second base, or third base." or "Dismissal from employment, or discharge from a position, usually as give (someone) the sack or get the sack. See verb sense4 below." or "Bed; usually as hit the sack or in the sack. See also sack out." or "(also sacque) A kind of loose-fitting gown or dress with sleeves which hangs from the shoulders, such as a gown with a Watteau back or sack-back, fashionable in the late 17th to 18th century; or, formerly, a loose-fitting hip-length jacket, cloak or cape." or "The scrotum." or "A variety of light-colored dry wine from Spain or the Canary Islands; also, any strong white wine from southern Europe; sherry."
  • sack can be used as a verb in the sense of "To put in a sack or sacks." or "To plunder or pillage, especially after capture; to obtain spoils of war from." or "To tackle, usually to tackle the offensive quarterback behind the line of scrimmage before he is able to throw a pass." or "To discharge from a job or position; to fire." or "In the phrase sack out, to fall asleep. See also hit the sack."

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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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