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Word Type

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

  • second can be used as a adjective in the sense of "The ordinal number corresponding to the cardinal number two." or "Number-two; following immediately after the first one." or "That which comes after the first."
  • second can be used as a verb in the sense of "Transfer temporarily to alternative employment." or "To assist." or "To agree as a second person to (a proposal), usually to reach a necessary quorum of two."
  • second can be used as a noun in the sense of "A manufactured item that, though still usable, fails to meet quality control standards." or "An additional helping of food." or "Another chance to achieve what should have been done the first time, usually indicating success this time around. (See second-guess.)" or "The interval between two adjacent notes in a diatonic scale (either or both of them may be raised or lowered from the basic scale via any type of accidental)." or "The second gear of an engine." or "Second base." or "The SI unit of time, defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of caesium-133 in a ground state at a temperature of absolute zero and at rest; one-sixtieth of a minute." or "A unit of angle equal to one-sixtieth of a minute of arc or one part in 3600 of a degree." or "A short, indeterminate amount of time." or "The attendant of a contestant in a duel or boxing match, who must be ready to take over if the contestant drops out. In the case of a duel, the seconds may also fight each other at 90 to the other contestants." or "One who agrees in addition, or such a motion, as required in certain meetings to pass judgement etc."

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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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