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Word Type

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

  • would can be used as a verb in the sense of "As a past-tense form of ." or "# Wished, desired (something)." or "# Wanted to ( + bare infinitive)." or "#* 1852, James Murdock, trans. Johann Lorenz Mosheim, Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, II.7.iii:" or "#*: The Greeks, especially those who would be thought adepts in mystic theology, ran after fantastic allegories [...]." or "# Used to; was or were habitually accustomed to ( + bare infinitive); indicating an action in the past that happened repeatedly or commonly." or "#* 2009, "Soundtrack of my life", The Guardian, 15 Mar 09:" or "#*: When we were kids we would sit by the radio with a tape recorder on a Sunday, listening out for the chart songs we wanted to have." or "# Used with bare infinitive to form the "anterior future", indicating a futurity relative to a past time." or "#* 1867, Anthony Trollope, Last Chronicle of Barset, ch. 28:" or "#*: That her Lily should have been won and not worn, had been, and would be, a trouble to her for ever." or "# Used with ellipsis of the infinitive verb, or postponement to a relative clause, in various senses." or "#* 1724, Daniel Defoe, Roxana, Penguin p. 107:" or "#*: He sat as one astonish'd, a good-while, looking at me, without speaking a Word, till I came quite up to him, kneel'd on one Knee to him, and almost whether he would or no, kiss'd his Hand [...]." or "#* 1846, "A New Sentimental Journey", Blackwoods Magazine, vol. LX, no. 372:" or "#*: If I could fly, I would away to those realms of light and warmth – far, far away in the southern clime [...]." or "# Was determined to; loosely, could naturally have been expected to (given the tendencies of someone's character etc.)." or "#* 1835, Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, V:" or "#*: Then he took to breeding silk-worms, which he would bring in two or three times a day, in little paper boxes, to show the old lady [...]." or "#* 2009, "Is the era of free news over?", The Observer, 10 May 09:" or "#*: The free access model, the media magnate said last week, was "malfunctioning". Well he would, wouldn't he?" or "As a modal verb." or "# Used to give a conditional or potential "softening" to the present; might, might wish." or "#* 2008, Mark Cocker, "Country Diary", The Guardian, 3 Nov 08:" or "#*: It's a piece of old folklore for which I would love to find hard proof." or "# Used as the auxiliary of the simple conditional mood (with a bare infinitive); indicating an action or state that is conditional on another." or "#* 2010, The Guardian, 26 Feb 2010:" or "#*: Warnock admitted it would be the ideal scenario if he received a Carling Cup winners' medal as well as an England call-up [...]." or "# Might wish ( + verb in past subjunctive); often used (with or without ) in the sense of "if only"." or "#* 1859, John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress," or "#*: I presently wished, would that I had been in their clothes! would that I had been born Peter! would that I had been born John!" or "#* 1868, Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ch. 23:" or "#*: I would she had retained her original haughtiness of disposition, or that I had a larger share of Front-de-Bœuf's thrice-tempered hardness of heart!" or "# Used to impart a sense of hesitancy or uncertainty to the present; might be inclined to. Now sometimes colloquially with ironic effect." or "#* 2009, Nick Snow, The Rocket's Trail, p. 112:" or "#*: “Those trials are being run by the American army so surely you must have access to the documents?” “Well, yeah, you'd think.”" or "#* 2010, Terry Pratchett, "My case for a euthanasia tribunal", The Guardian, 2 Feb 2010:" or "#*: Departing on schedule with the help of a friendly doctor was quite usual. Does that still apply? It would seem so." or "# Used interrogatively to express a polite request; are (you) willing to...?" or "#: Would you pass the salt, please?" or "# Might desire; wish (something)." or "#* 1608, William Shakespeare, King Lear, I.4:" or "#*: What dost thou professe? What would'st thou with vs?"

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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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