Say I'm going to write an article about inventors and want to do some background research to see how others have described them, what studies show about them, etc. I go to an Internet search engine like Google and type "Inventors ~are *" The ~ in front of the "are" will give me synonyms for the word "are." The wild card of "*" will give me ALL parts of speech following the phrase "inventors are." But I only want adjectives like fat, stupid, lazy, hot, etc. I don't want prepositions, conjunctions, or pronouns. I want to be able to hunt for adjectives only with a search like "inventors are *adjective" where *adjective better defines the wild card I seek. I could also search for *noun, *verb and so on. The search engine would have to look to a list of words for various parts of speech such as (1). Edit 2013-08-24: the Asterisk could also be placed in the front of a number -- *number, or symbol -- *@ in order to search for these specific items.
-- Sunstone, Jul 31 2013

(1) List of adjectives http://www.esldesk....cabulary/adjectives
Parts of speech database a search engine would require for more specific wild card searches [Sunstone, Jul 31 2013]

Hmm. I didn't think much of your example, but on momentary reflection I think it would be very useful to be able to specify parts of speech in searches. Google should *verb this.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 31 2013


But would it work as a mouse trap?
-- pashute, Jan 08 2014


Oh. I thought this was going to have to do with my San Diego Chargers making it into the playoffs.
-- normzone, Jan 08 2014



random, halfbakery