Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- smooth can be used as a noun in the sense of "Something which is smooth or easy." or "A smoothing action." or "A domestic animal having a smooth coat." or "A member of an anti-hippie fashion movement in 1970s Britain." or "The analysis obtained through a smoothing procedure."
- smooth can be used as a adjective in the sense of "Having a texture that lacks friction. Not rough." or "Without difficulty, problems, or unexpected consequences or incidents." or "bland; glib" or "suave; sophisticated" or "natural; unconstrained" or "unbroken" or "placid, calm." or "Lacking projections or indentations; not serrated." or "Not grainy; having an even texture." or "Having a pleasantly rounded flavor; neither rough nor astringent." or "Having derivatives of all finite orders at all points within the function's domain." or "Lacking marked aspiration."
- smooth can be used as a verb in the sense of "To make smooth." or "To capture important patterns in the data, while leaving out noise."
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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).
