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Word Type

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

  • smoke can be used as a verb in the sense of "To inhale and exhale the smoke from a burning cigarette, cigar, pipe, etc." or "To inhale and exhale tobacco smoke regularly or habitually." or "To give off smoke." or "To preserve or prepare (food) for consumption by treating with smoke." or "To perform (e.g. music) energetically or skillfully. Almost always in present participle form." or "To kill, especially with a gun."
  • smoke can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Of the colour known as smoke."
  • smoke can be used as a noun in the sense of "The visible vapor/vapour, gases, and fine particles given off by burning or smoldering material." or "A cigarette." or "An instance of smoking a cigarette, cigar, etc.; the duration of this act." or "A fleeting illusion; something insubstantial, evanescent, unreal, transitory, or without result." or "Something used to obscure or conceal; an obscuring condition; see also smoke and mirrors." or "A light grey colour/color tinted with blue." or "A particulate of solid or liquid particles dispersed into the air on the battlefield to degrade enemy ground or for aerial observation. Smoke has many uses--screening smoke, signaling smoke, smoke curtain, smoke haze, and smoke deception. Thus it is an artificial aerosol." or "A fastball." or "(The Smoke) London"

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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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