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Q&A Is there a freely available sentence patterns search engine?

As the title says. Background I often find myself in the need of building an English sentence that I almost know how to get right. The scaffolding is there, but there are maybe one or two words ...

4 answers  ·  posted 1y ago by Lorenzo Donati‭  ·  last activity 1mo ago by Lorenzo Donati‭

#2: Nominated for promotion by user avatar Moshi‭ · 2023-08-11T14:46:00Z (over 1 year ago)
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Lorenzo Donati‭ · 2023-08-09T08:48:00Z (over 1 year ago)
Is there a freely available sentence patterns search engine?
As the title says.

#### Background

I often find myself in the need of building an English sentence that I *almost* know how to get right.

The scaffolding is there, but there are maybe one or two words missing. Maybe just an adjective or an adverb. Maybe I already know a "good enough" word, but I feel I need something better. Maybe I *know* there is something better, but it just doesn't pop-up in my mind.

Ideally I would like a search engine that allowed me to type something like this:

*The name was written on a brass plate that was (?) on the wall beside the door.*

Where (?) represents the missing word in some kind of formalized language (like a regular expression or a search expression of some sort).

And the search engine would spit out possible words that could be placed in that spot *making the sentence complete **and** sensible*.

Ideally it would also take suggestions about what "meaning" I need, e.g. (?fixed?), so that it would spit out suggestions like "bolted", "latched", "nailed", etc., but not "put", "hanged" or "placed".

I hope you get the point.

Does such a search engine exist and is it freely (as in "free beer") available?

BTW, I'm interested essentially in a tool that manages English, but it's OK if it also manages other languages.