What online resource can I use to find sentences that use a word in a specific part of speech?

I recall there is an online service that lets you search for a word (like "sky") and shows you sentences that use that word but you can filter by part of speech (the noun "sky" vs. the verb "to sky"). Any suggestions?

Solution 1:

Google NGrams:

sky_VERB

for sky as a verb (I expect that is rare).

sky_*

for 'sky' grouped by part of speech.

Solution 2:

If you just type the word into Google like this:

• Define FOOBAR

It usually shows usage examples for each part of speech that the word can be used as.

(Not that I'm recommending that as your main or authoritative dictionary for definitions or etymology.) I would recommend checking, at the least, Oxford http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/ and Merriam-Webster online http://i.word.com/

Solution 3:

As I was curious to follow @RegDwigнt's comment, I looked at the Corpus of Contemporary American English and found this page of Word Frequencies. The cited page is free.

Scanning through the list, one can observe abuse as both a noun and a verb. Its rank as a noun is 1548 and its frequency is 24534 in the corpus. Its rank as a verb is 3778 and its frequency is 7554.

The OP example of sky only appears as a noun on the abbreviated Word Frequencies page.

Using the download hyperlink, one can receive a short list of 5000 words, by email, also for free. If you download this list, you can use a filter function (such as found in Excel) to only restrict the list to only verbs or only the word sky. One would have to pay for larger lists.