Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- tack can be used as a noun in the sense of "A small nail with a flat head." or "A loose seam used to temporarily fasten pieces of cloth." or "(Wikipedia) The lower corner on the leading edge of a sail relative to the direction of the wind." or "A course or direction that enables the vessel to head upwind. See also reach, gybe." or "A direction or course of action, especially one that differs from the previous one." or "The maneuver by which a sailing vessel turns its bow through the wind so that the wind changes from one side to the other." or "Any of the various equipment and accessories worn by horses in the course of their use as domesticated animals. Saddles, stirrups, bridles, halters, reins, bits, harnesses, martingales, and breastplates are all forms of horse tack." or "The stickiness of a compound, related to its cohesive and adhesive properties."
- tack can be used as a verb in the sense of "To secure with tacks." or "To turn a vessel onto the other tack; come about." or "To sail toward the direction of the wind by tacking repeatedly." or "To nail with a tack (small nail with a flat head)." or "To sew/stich with a tack (loose seam used to temporarily fasten pieces of cloth)." or "To maneuver a sailing vessel so that its bow turns through the wind, i.e. the wind changes from one side of the vessel to the other (Wikipedia)." or "To add something as an extra item." or "Often with "up"", to place the tack on a horse."
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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).
