Word Type
vuvuzela is a noun:
- A trumpet shaped horn which is blown by fans at soccer matches in South Africa and produces a loud sound.
"Firstly what is a vuvuzela, well on the left is a picture of our Finance Minster, Trevor Manual, blowing on one (picture © Esa Alexander, Die Burger). Essentially it is an elongated trumpet type instrument made from plastic that requires some serious lip and lung strength to blow it. Then the noise that it emits is something like a deep foghorn or an elephant. [http://www.sa2010blog.com/2004/05/vuvuzela.html]"
Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →
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What type of word is vuvuzela?
- Noun usage: Firstly what is a vuvuzela, well on the left is a picture of our Finance Minster, Trevor Manual, blowing on one (picture © Esa Alexander, Die Burger). Essentially it is an elongated trumpet type instrument made from plastic that requires some serious lip and lung strength to blow it. Then the noise that it emits is something like a deep foghorn or an elephant. [http://www.sa2010blog.com/2004/05/vuvuzela.html]
- Noun usage: When the Manchester United squad walked thorough the arrival gates at Durban International yesterday, most players heard a vuvuzela for the first time. Weekend Argus July 15 2006.07.15
- Noun usage: The Vuvuzela, originally made out of tin, but now locally manufactured in plastic by Masincedane Sport for 3 years, has certainly influenced and shaped South Africa’s soccer culture into being what it is today – alive, vocal and energetic. [http://www.vuvuzela4africa.com/News.htm]
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of vuvuzela 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 vuvuzela, 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).
