Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- vamp can be used as a noun in the sense of "The top part of a boot or shoe, above the sole and welt and in front of the ankle seam, that covers the instep and toes; an upperdef. 2; the analogous part of a stocking." or "Something added to give an old thing a new appearance; a patch." or "Something patched up, pieced together, improvised, or refurbished." or "A repeated and often improvised accompaniment, usually consisting of one or two measures, often a single chord or simple chord progression, repeated as necessary, e.g., to accommodate dialogue or to anticipate the entrance of a soloist." or "An activity or speech intended to fill time or stall." or "A flirtatious, seductive woman, especially one who uses sexual desire to exploit men." or "A volunteer fire fighter."
- vamp can be used as a verb in the sense of "To attach a vamp." or "To walk." or "To patch, repair, or refurbish." or "(often as vamp up) to put together, improvise, or fabricate." or "To perform a vamp; to perform a repeated, often improvised accompaniment, e.g. under dialogue or awaiting the readiness of a soloist." or "To stall or delay, as for an audience." or "To seduce or exploit someone."
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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).
