Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- switch can be used as a noun in the sense of "A device to turn electric current on and off or direct its flow." or "A movable section of railroad track which allows the train to be directed down one of two destination tracks; point." or "A slender woody plant stem used as a whip." or "A command line notation allowing specification of optional behavior." or "A networking device connecting multiple wires, allowing them to communicate simultaneously, when possible. Compare to the less efficient hub device that solely duplicates network packets to each wire." or "A system of specialized relays, computer hardware, or other equipment which allows the interconnection of a calling party's telephone line with any called party's line." or "One who is willing to take either a sadistic or a masochistic role."
- switch can be used as a verb in the sense of "To exchange." or "To change (something) to the specified state using a switch." or "To whip or hit with a switch." or "To change places, tasks, etc." or "To get angry suddenly; to quickly or unreasonably become enraged."
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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).
