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Word Type

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

  • turn can be used as a verb in the sense of "Of a body, person, etc, to move around an axis through itself." or "To change the direction or orientation of." or "To change one's direction of travel." or "To position (something) by folding it." or "To become ." or "To fundamentally change; to metamorphose." or "To rebel; to go against something formerly tolerated." or "To shape (something) symmetrically by rotating it against a stationary cutting tool, as on a lathe." or "To sour or spoil; to go bad." or "To complete." or "Of a bowler, to make (the ball) move sideways off the pitch when it bounces." or "Of a ball, to move sideways off the pitch when it bounces." or "To change personalities, such as from being a face (good guy) to heel (bad guy) or vice versa."
  • turn can be used as a noun in the sense of "A change of direction or orientation." or "A movement of an object about its own axis in one direction that continues until the object returns to its initial orientation." or "A single loop of a coil." or "A chance to use (something) shared in sequence with others." or "One's chance to make a move in a game having two or more players." or "A figure in music, often denoted ~, consisting of the note above the one indicated, the note itself, the note below the one indicated, and the note itself again." or "(also turnaround) The time required to complete a project." or "A fit or a period of giddiness." or "A change in temperament or circumstance." or "A sideways movement of the ball when it bounces (caused by rotation in flight)" or "The fourth communal card in Texas hold 'em." or "The flop (the first three community cards) in Texas hold 'em" or "the basic coil element that forms a single conducting loop comprised of one insulated conductor." or "A deed done to another."

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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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