Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- shell can be used as a verb in the sense of "To remove the outer covering or shell of something. See sheller." or "To bombard, to fire projectiles at." or "To disburse or give up money, to pay. (Often used with out)."
- shell can be used as a noun in the sense of "The calcareous or chitinous external covering of mollusks, crustaceans, and some other invertebrates." or "The hard calcareous covering of a bird egg." or "The exoskeleton or wing covers of certain insects." or "The covering, or outside part, of a nut." or "A pod containing the seeds of certain plants, such as the legume Phaseolus vulgaris." or "Husks of cacao seeds, a decoction of which is sometimes used as a substitute or adulterant for cocoa and its products such as chocolate." or "The conjoined scutes that comprise the "shell" (carapace) of a tortoise or turtle." or "The overlapping hard plates comprising the armor covering the armadillo's body." or "The accreted mineral formed around a hollow geode." or "The casing of a self-contained single-unit artillery projectile." or "A hollow usually spherical or cylindrical projectile fired from a seige mortar or a smoothbore cannon. It contains an explosive substance designed to be ignited by a fuse or by percussion at the target site so that it will burst and scattered at high velocity its contents and fragments. Formerly called a bomb (q.v.)." or "The cartridge of a breechloading firearm; a load; a bullet; a round." or "Any slight hollow structure; a framework, or exterior structure, regarded as not complete or filled in, as the shell of a house." or "A garment, usually worn by women, such as a shirt, blouse, or top, with short sleeves or no sleeves, that often fastens in the rear." or "A coarse or flimsy coffin; a thin interior coffin enclosed within a more substantial one." or "A string instrument, as a lyre, whose acoustical chamber is formed like a shell." or "The body of a drum; the often wooden, often cylindrical acoustic chamber, with or without rims added for tuning and for attaching the drum head." or "An engraved copper roller used in print works." or "The watertight outer covering of the hull of a vessel, often made with planking or metal plating." or "The outer frame or case of a block within which the sheaves revolve." or "A light boat the frame of which is covered with thin wood, impermeable fabric, or water-proofed paper; a racing shell or dragon boat." or "A general-purpose environment, usually command-line-oriented, within which other commands are invoked and their interactions controlled." or "A set of atomic orbitals that have the same principal quantum number." or "An emaciated person." or "A psychological barrier to social interaction."
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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).
