This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
What type of word is ~term~ ?
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don’t have data about which senses of ~term~ 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 ~term~ , and guess at its most common usage.
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).
Black & White – symbolic meaning in art & design
Colours have their own symbolism in cultures, religions and history. Black and white are, strictly speaking, not colours. However, light and dark play a major role in art and design and have various symbolic meanings. ‘Black & White | Symbolic Meaning in Art and Design’ presents works from the museum collection that show how contemporary artists and designers interpret the symbolic meaning of black and white. The exhibition features works by artists including Jorge Baldessari, Maria Roosen, Alet Pilon,Jeroen Eisinga, Marinus Boezem, Bart Hess, Célio Braga, Studio Formafantasma and Felieke van der Leest.
Wish I had 1 (Zwanenrok) – Alet Pilon
BLACK – WHITE
Opposites
Colours are wavelengths reflected by objects to the human eye. White is pure light and black is the absence of light. In many cultures, these two non-colours are associated with life and death rituals. For essential questions about identity, the opposites black and white are often chosen. In Marinus Boezem’s (*1934) installation ‘The absence of the artist’(1970), as well as in the oeuvre of the late Anna Verwey-Verschuure (1935-1980), black and white are used to address themes such as identity, presence and absence. Argentinian conceptual artist Jorge Baldessari (*1931) makes optimal use of the contrast between black and white in his embroidered poem ‘Tools’ (1994-95), a conversation with the divine creator who expelled mankind from paradise. In the more abstract works by Lam de Wolf (*1949) and Elke Lutgerink (*1982), black and white appear as both each other’s opposites and continuum.
Zwarte Madonna – Alet Pilon
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Wish I had 1 (Zwanenrok) – Alet Pilon
Colonna – Formafantasma
Traveling Cities anno 2014 – Karin van Dam, foto: Tom Haartsen
WHITE
Innocence, purity, loyalty
In many cultures, white is seen as the colour of innocence and virginity, purity, loyalty and peace. In the West, white clothing and decoration are symbolic of the joy around births, baptisms and weddings. The colour is also associated with women as virgins, mothers and caregivers. These themes find a playful and poetic expression in the works by Regula Maria Müller (*1961), Maria Roosen (*1957) and Hinke Schreuders (*1969) and the jewellery by Felieke van der Leest (*1968), but they also examine female roles.
In many African and Asian cultures, as well as in medieval Europe, white is the traditional colour of death and mourning. In the West, meanwhile, black has symbolised mourning since the Renaissance. Miriam Verbeek (*1960) refers to these intercultural differences in her series of black and white mourning jewellery. White represents purity, holiness and eternity in religions including Christianity and Islam. Christian Bastiaans’ (*1951) ‘Madonna of Humility’ (2003) from the series Hurt Modelsreflects the Christian meaning of white as an expression of purity. However, the delicate sculpture made of iron wire and gauze primarily explores the vulnerability of human existence.
Artist Alet Pilon (*1949) also explores the symbolic connotations of black and white in her work and often gives it a surreal twist. Her white ‘ZT (Swan wings)’ from 1995 is a sculptural piece that can be worn around the shoulders. Her work evokes associations with the famous ballet piece of the dying swan and the fate of the mythical Greek hero Icarus. Icarus’ wings of swan feathers and wax melted when he flew too close to the sun. Pilon’s swan wings seem to be an echo of this shattered dream.
