Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- squib can be used as a verb in the sense of "To make a sound such as a small explosion."
- squib can be used as a noun in the sense of "A small firework that is intended to spew sparks rather than explode." or "A similar device used to ignite an explosive or launch a rocket, etc." or "Any small firecracker sold to the general public. Usually available in special clusters designed to explode in series after a single master fuze is lit." or "The heating element used to set off the sodium azide pellets in a vehicle's airbag." or "A small explosive used to replicate a bullet hitting a surface." or "A short piece of witty writing; a lampoon." or "In a legal casebook, a short summary of a legal action placed between more fully cited cases." or "A short article, often published in journals, that introduces empirical data problematic to linguistic theory or discusses an overlooked theoretical problem. In contrast to a typical linguistic article, a squib need not answer the questions that it poses." or "An unimportant, paltry, or mean-spirited person."
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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).
