WordType Logo

Word Type

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

  • trim can be used as a verb in the sense of "to reduce slightly; to cut; especially, to remove excess; e.g. 'trim a hedge', 'trim a beard'." or "to decorate or adorn; especially, to decorate a Christmas tree" or "To modify the angle of a vessel to the water by shifting cargo or ballast; to adjust for sailing; to assume, or cause a vessel to assume, a certain position, or trim, in the water. (FM 55-501)." or "To modify the angle of a vessel's sails relative to the wind, especially to set the sails to the most advantageous angle."
  • trim can be used as a adjective in the sense of "physically fit" or "slender, lean; as a trim figure" or "neat or smart in appearance; as a trim lawn"
  • trim can be used as a adverb in the sense of "In good order, properly managed or maintained." or "With sails well trimmed."
  • trim can be used as a noun in the sense of "decoration; especially, decoration placed along edges or borders" or "a haircut, especially a moderate one to touch up an existing style" or "the manner in which something is equipped or adorned; especially, of a car" or "engaging in sexual intercourse" or "The fore-and-aft angle of the vessel to the water, with reference to the cargo and ballast; the manner in which a vessel floats on the water, whether on an even keel or down by the head or stern" or "The arrangement of the sails with reference to the wind."

Related Searches

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).

Recent Queries