Describing Words
This tool helps you find adjectives for things that you're trying to describe. Also check out ReverseDictionary.org and RelatedWords.org.
Click words for definitions.
Words to Describe constraints
Below is a list of describing words for constraints. You can sort the descriptive words by uniqueness or commonness using the button above. Sorry if there's a few unusual suggestions! The algorithm isn't perfect, but it does a pretty good job for most common nouns. Here's the list of words that can be used to describe constraints:
- ridiculous ecological
- human epistemological
- long-run economic
- hardly tolerable
- old syntactical
- external, artificial and mechanical
- effective and perfect
- domestic or legal
- prewar fiscal
- gloomy and mute
- severe macroeconomic
- weird and overpowering
- somewhat looser
- slightly vexatious
- fiendishly difficult and precise
- slight and unaccountable
- cruel, grievous
- odd, all-pervading
- civilized conventional
- stiff and watchful
- administrative, financial and legal
- legal and consequently artificial
- nameless but powerful
- sweet and prodigal
- still calamitous
- improper or wrongful
- tighter fiscal
- slight timid
- earlier tactical
- severe legal
- owne sweet
- apply reasonable
- consequently artificial
- parent-child mental
- queer, coarse
- legal, partisan or economic
- mere methodical
- partisan or economic
- everyday spatial
- c—mathematical
- domestic legal
- powerful formal
- geometric and geophysical
- structural, internal
- mere conscientious
- gentle and delightful
- collective european
- arcane technical
- external sensuous
- strange gloomy
- particularly galling
- natural physiological
- active parental
- political and budgetary
- obvious and extreme
- religious and rational
- careful and rational
- few journalistic
- extra-causal
- current budgetary
- peculiar, indefinable
- similar necessary
- original rustic
- outer social
- severe economic
- long unnatural
- sudden, shy
- rare and odd
- current fiscal
- parent-child coercive
- fewer physical
- exclusively moral
- rigid legal
- deep and delicious
- alone physical
- vnnatural
- unnatural and horrible
- dull and stolid
- absolute and irresistible
- artificial and mechanical
- human metabolic
- severe external
- fiendishly difficult
- strong disciplinary
- morial
- veritable physical
- antibiological
- gravitational and other
- absolutely irresistible
- normal moral
- economic and material
- much traditional
- such middle-class
- unfortunate commercial
- tight social
- such stiff
- physical or political
- individual and tribal
- heavy female
- single unnatural
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Describing Words
The idea for the Describing Words engine came when I was building the engine for Related Words (it's like a thesaurus, but gives you a much broader set of related words, rather than just synonyms). While playing around with word vectors and the "HasProperty" API of conceptnet, I had a bit of fun trying to get the adjectives which commonly describe a word. Eventually I realised that there's a much better way of doing this: parse books!
Project Gutenberg was the initial corpus, but the parser got greedier and greedier and I ended up feeding it somewhere around 100 gigabytes of text files - mostly fiction, including many contemporary works. The parser simply looks through each book and pulls out the various descriptions of nouns.
Hopefully it's more than just a novelty and some people will actually find it useful for their writing and brainstorming, but one neat little thing to try is to compare two nouns which are similar, but different in some significant way - for example, gender is interesting: "woman" versus "man" and "boy" versus "girl". On an inital quick analysis it seems that authors of fiction are at least 4x more likely to describe women (as opposed to men) with beauty-related terms (regarding their weight, features and general attractiveness). In fact, "beautiful" is possibly the most widely used adjective for women in all of the world's literature, which is quite in line with the general unidimensional representation of women in many other media forms. If anyone wants to do further research into this, let me know and I can give you a lot more data (for example, there are about 25000 different entries for "woman" - too many to show here).
The blueness of the results represents their relative frequency. You can hover over an item for a second and the frequency score should pop up. The "uniqueness" sorting is default, and thanks to my Complicated Algorithm™, it orders them by the adjectives' uniqueness to that particular noun relative to other nouns (it's actually pretty simple). As you'd expect, you can click the "Sort By Usage Frequency" button to adjectives by their usage frequency for that noun.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source mongodb which was used in this project.
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