Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- spring can be used as a verb in the sense of "To start to exist." or "To jump or leap." or "To release or set free, especially from prison."
- spring can be used as a noun in the sense of "Traditionally the first of the four seasons of the year in temperate regions, in which plants spring from the ground and trees come into blossom, following winter and preceding summer." or "Meteorologically, the months of March, April and May in the northern hemisphere (or September, October and November in the southern)." or "The astronomically delineated period from the moment of vernal equinox, approximately March 20 in the northern hemisphere (September 22 in the southern), to the moment of the summer solstice, approximately June 21 (December 22)." or "Spring tide; a tide of greater-than-average range, that is, around the first or third quarter of a lunar month, or around the times of the new or full moon." or "A place where water emerges from the ground." or "The property of a body of springing to its original form after being compressed, stretched, etc." or "A mechanical device made of flexible or coiled material that exerts force when it is bent, compressed or stretched." or "A rope attaching the bow of a vessel to the stern-side of the jetty, or vice versa, to stop the vessel from surging." or "An erection of the penis." or "The source of an action"
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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).
