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Word Type

This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.

  • tree can be used as a verb in the sense of "To chase (an animal or person) up a tree."
  • tree can be used as a noun in the sense of "A large plant, not exactly defined, but typically over four meters in height, a single trunk which grows in girth with age and branches (which also grow in circumference with age)." or "Any plant that is reminiscent of the above but not classified as a tree in the strict botanical sense: for example the banana "tree"." or "An object made from a tree trunk and having multiple hooks or storage platforms." or "A device used to hold or stretch a shoe open." or "The structural frame of a saddle." or "A connected graph with no cycles or, equivalently, a connected graph with n vertices and n-1 edges." or "A recursive data structure in which each node has zero or more nodes as children." or "A display or listing of entries or elements such that there are primary and secondary entries shown, usually linked by drawn lines or by indenting to the right." or "Any structure or construct having branches akin to (1)." or "The structure or wooden frame used in the construction of a saddle used in horse riding."

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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).

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