Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- spread can be used as a verb in the sense of "To stretch out, open out (a material etc.) so that it more fully covers a given area of space." or "To extend (individual rays, limbs etc.); to stretch out in varying or opposing directions." or "To disperse, to scatter or distribute over a given area." or "To proliferate; to become more widely present, to be disseminated." or "To disseminate; to cause to proliferate, to make (something) widely known or present." or "To take up a larger area or space; to expand, be extended." or "To smear, to distribute in a thin layer." or "To cover (something) with a thin layer of some substance, as of butter." or "To open one's legs."
- spread can be used as a noun in the sense of "The act of spreading or something that has been spread." or "An expanse of land." or "A piece of material used as a cover (such as a bedspread)." or "A large meal, especially one laid out on a table." or "Any form of food designed to be spread onto a slice of bread etc." or "An item in a newspaper or magazine that occupies more than one column or page." or "A numerical difference." or "The difference between the wholesale and retail prices." or "The difference between the price of a futures month and the price of another month of the same commodity." or "The purchase of a futures contract of one delivery month against the sale of another futures delivery month of the same commodity." or "The purchase of one delivery month of one commodity against the sale of that same delivery month of a different commodity." or "An arbitrage transaction of the same commodity in two markets, executed to take advantage of a profit from price discrepancies." or "The difference between bidding and asking price." or "The difference between the prices of two similar items."
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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).
