Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- serve can be used as a noun in the sense of "the act of putting the ball or shuttlecock in play in various games" or "A portion of food, a serving"
- serve can be used as a verb in the sense of "To work for; to labor in behalf of; to exert one's self continuously or statedly for the benefit of; to do service for; to be in the employment of, as an inferior, domestic, serf, slave, hired assistant, official helper, etc." or "To obey and worship." or "To be subordinate to; to act a secondary part under; to appear as the inferior of; to minister to." or "To be suitor to; to profess love to." or "To wait upon; to supply the wants of; to attend; specifically, to wait upon at table; to attend at meals; to supply with food" or "To bring forward, arrange, deal, or distribute, as a portion of anything, especially of food prepared for eating; -- often with serve up; formerly with serve in." or "To perform the duties belonging to, or required in or for; hence, to be of use to." or "To contribute to or conduce to; to promote; to be sufficient for; to satisfy" or "To answer or be (in the place of something) to." or "To treat; to behave one's self to; to requite; to act toward." or "To work; to operate." or "To bring to notice, deliver, or execute, either actually or constructively, in such manner as the law requires" or "To make legal service upon (a person named in a writ, summons, etc.); as, to serve a witness with a subpoena." or "To pass or spend, as time, esp. time of punishment; as, to serve a term in prison." or "To copulate with; to verb." or "To lead off with the first delivery (of the ball) over the net, as in tennis, volleyball, ping pong, etc." or "To wind spun yarn, or the like, tightly around (a rope or cable, etc.) so as to protect it from chafing or from the weather. See under Serving." or "To be a servant or a slave; to be employed in labor or other business for another; to be in subjection or bondage; to render menial service." or "To perform domestic offices; to be occupied with household affairs; to prepare and dish up food, etc." or "To be in service; to do duty; to discharge the requirements of an office or employment. Specifically, to act in the public service, as a soldier, seaman. etc." or "To be of use; to answer a purpose; to suffice; to suit; to be convenient or favorable."
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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).
