Word Type
un- is a prefix:
- not, absent, lacking
"unannounced — “not being announced”" - violative, contrary, opposite
"unconstitutional — “in violation of or contrary to the constitution”" - reverse, opposite
"to undress — “to take one's clothes off”" - release, free, remove, extract.
"to uncage — “to release from a cage”" - Used to form temporary names of elements (such as ununbium) whose existence has been predicted, and have not yet been given a systematic name.
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What type of word is un-?
- Prefix usage: unannounced — “not being announced”
- Prefix usage: uneducated — “not educated”
- Prefix usage: unattractiveness — “lack of attractiveness; ugliness”
- Prefix usage: unrest — “a lack of rest (peace); war”
- Prefix usage: unconstitutional — “in violation of or contrary to the constitution”
- Prefix usage: to undress — “to take one's clothes off”
- Prefix usage: to unwind — “to reverse a winding”
- Prefix usage: to unlock — “to undo the locking of”
- Prefix usage: to uncage — “to release from a cage”
- Prefix usage: to untangle — “to remove the tangling of”
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of un- are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of un-, and guess at its most common usage.
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).
