Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- scratch can be used as a verb in the sense of "To rub a surface with a sharp object, especially by a living creature to remove itching with nails, claws, etc." or "To rub the skin with rough material causing a sensation of irritation." or "To mark a surface with a sharp object, thereby leaving a scratch (noun)." or "To remove, ignore or delete." or "To produce a distinctive sound on a turntable, by moving a vinyl record back and forth while manipulating the crossfader. See scratching" or "To commit a foul in pool, as where the cue ball is put into a pocket or jumps off the table." or "A technical error of touching or surpassing the starting mark prior to the official start signal in the sporting events long jump (also called running broad jump), standing broad jump, discus, hammer throw, shot put, and similar events. Originally the starting mark was a scratch on the ground but now a board or precisely indicated mark." or "To remove from a list."
- scratch can be used as a adjective in the sense of "For or consisting of preliminary or tentative, incomplete, etc. work." or "Relating to a data structure or recording medium attached to a machine for testing or temporary-use purposes." or "A very good player who does not have a handicap, i.e. one who competes without the benefit of a variation in scoring based on the player's ability."
- scratch can be used as a noun in the sense of "A disruption, mark or shallow cut on a surface made by scratching." or "An act of scratching the skin to alleviate an itch or irritation." or "A starting line (originally and simply, a line scratched in the ground)." or "A foul in pool, as where the cue ball is put into a pocket or jumps off the table." or "money"
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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).
