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. Hint: If a sentence beginning with a there is or there are construction can be rewritten without the word there, you are working with the expletive form of the word.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. You can tell the first example expresses more drama, right? Used sparingly, expletive constructions with there is or there are can be titillating. There are explosives hidden under the railway bridge! (Delayed Subject - explosives)Įxplosives are hidden under the railway bridge! ( There is omitted to get to the point.) Here’s an example sentence demonstrating these structures:

Authors like to use it like a bit of “seasoning” to keep readers tuned in. This occurs because expletives are used to postpone the subject to build a little suspense for the reader. Mind you, starting a sentence with these constructions will lead to wordy sentence writing, and they’re usually too passive for most written compositions. An expletive is an “extra word” not grammatically related to the rest of the sentence. In these contexts, the word there is classified as an expletive.

The chart can help, but also pay close attention to specific grammatical constructions when there is or there are start the sentence.

What part of speech is the word about