What kind of phrase is by the way?

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).

Collocations

Thesaurus

Blog

BuzzWord

Open Dictionary

Resources

Quizzes

Videos

Search

BuzzWord

Open Dictionary

Resources

Quizzes

Videos

Search

IDM

by the way ​Definitions and Synonyms

phrase

DEFINITIONS1

1. 1

   used for saying that a remark is not relevant to the main subject of your conversation. The abbreviation BTW is often used in electronic messages.

   By the way, Jeff called this afternoon and he wants you to call him back.

   Synonyms and related words

   ---

   Ways of adding extra information

   namely

   incidentally

   furthermore

   ...

   Explore Thesaurus ​

Definition and synonyms of by the way from the online English dictionary from Macmillan Education.

This is the British English definition of by the way.View American English definition of by the way.

Change your default dictionary to American English.

See also main entry: by​See also main entry: by​

Thesaurus

Trending Words

for

-1.3%

snowflake

47.8%

blue movie

2.7%

take on

1.7%

put off

-12.1%

Discover

Synonyms of the month

gift

present

surprise

token

package

largesse

treat

Browse more

Using the dictionary ​

Quizzes

Vocabulary quiz: trending words of 2020

Take the quiz now

Contact Privacy Consent Management Cookies Policy Terms and Conditions FAQ Index

About Authors Partners Options Tools

FOLLOW US

Twitter Facebook

Join Macmillan Dictionary on Twitter and Facebook for daily word facts, quizzes and language news.

© Macmillan Education Limited 2009–2022

What phrase is by the way?

What are the type of phrases?

Is by the way a sentence?

Where does the phrase by the way come from?