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 fossils
Below is a list of describing words for fossils. 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 fossils:
- old, preglacial
- common, world-wide
- youngest neanderthal
- dissimilar organic
- original neanderthal
- chemical or morphological
- formal and apparently meaningless
- entire or fragmentary
- oldest, vertebrate
- few and very imperfect
- littoral and deep-sea
- hands--political
- additional characteristic
- \terrestrial
- characteristic or organic
- grey and rheumatic
- characteristic zonal
- wonderful and countless
- reconstructed genetic
- unpopular neanderthal
- cryctognostically simple
- interesting philological
- british tertiary
- numerous and abundant
- interesting mammalian
- strange animated
- characteristic british
- abundant and interesting
- prehistoric animal
- certain homogeneous
- few extraneous
- natural or native
- upper tertiary
- abundant and characteristic
- same extinct
- anthropoidal
- such inefficient
- other abundant
- mineral and metallic
- curiously poignant
- zonal
- melon-like
- specially characteristic
- other vertebrate
- preglacial
- significant human
- mere constitutional
- certain outlying
- few distinct
- vertebrate
- other mammalian
- neanderthal
- such uncouth
- other satisfactory
- oldest human
- various obscure
- slender and delicate
- quite interesting
- most ancient
- frightful old
- also beautiful
- early tertiary
- together different
- often beautiful
- many peculiar
- prosy old
- tertiary
- mammalian
- such old
- lovable old
- strikingly different
- british and italian
- less ancient
- peculiar and characteristic
- common british
- stingy old
- few valuable
- last faint
- apparently meaningless
- certain precious
- marsupial
- certain characteristic
- many well-known
- interesting and beautiful
- other curious
- determinable
- other nearby
- useless old
- other characteristic
- extraneous
- few characteristic
- such literary
- stuffy old
- certain obscure
- awful old
- many interesting
- other, larger
- great and little
- characteristic
- other nameless
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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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