Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- span can be used as a noun in the sense of "The space from the thumb to the end of the little finger when extended; nine inches; eighth of a fathom." or "Hence, a small space or a brief portion of time." or "The spread or extent of an arch or between its abutments, or of a beam, girder, truss, roof, bridge, or the like, between supports." or "The length of a cable, wire, rope, chain between two consecutive supports." or "A rope having its ends made fast so that a purchase can be hooked to the bight; also, a rope made fast in the center so that both ends can be used." or "A pair of horses or other animals driven together; usually, such a pair of horses when similar in color, form, and action." or "the space of all linear combinations of something"
- span can be used as a verb in the sense of "To traverse the distance between." or "To cover or extend over an area or time period." or "Two horses of the same color drawing a carriage, moving in perfect unison." or "to generate an entire space by means of linear combinations" or "
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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).
