
It simply looks through tonnes of dictionary definitions and grabs the ones that most closely match your search query. 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).The way Reverse Dictionary works is pretty simple. Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), and express.js.Ĭurrently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. 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.

The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. 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.įinally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. 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. 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.

Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. 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.
