Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- transit can be used as a noun in the sense of "The act of passing over, across, or through something." or "The conveyance of people or goods from one place to another, especially on a public transportation system; the vehicles used for such conveyance." or "The passage of a celestial body across the observer's meridian, or across the disk of a larger celestial body." or "A surveying instrument rather like a theodolite that measures horizontal and vertical angles." or "an imaginary line between two objects whose positions are known. When the navigator sees one object directly in front of the other, then navigator knows that his position is on the transit." or "a Ford Transit van." or "to carry communications traffic to and from a customer or another network on a compensation basis as opposed to peerage in which the traffic to and from another network is carried on an equivalency basis or without charge."
- transit can be used as a verb in the sense of "To pass over, across or through something" or "To revolve an instrument about its horizontal axis so as to reverse its direction" or "To make a transit"
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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).