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 lectures
Below is a list of describing words for lectures. 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 lectures:
- old-style public
- ineffective and stuffy
- lengthy and somewhat dull
- wild cosmological
- astonishingly popular
- stilted sociological
- generally boring
- forrestal memorial
- stultifying and endless
- spirited and vividly profane
- vividly profane
- elegant and comprehensive
- edifying and informative
- long and very useless
- professorial didactic
- scientific, literary and historical
- last undelivered
- difficult impressive
- long and fairly technical
- necessarily provisional and preliminary
- stiffly professional
- public exegetical
- long and arcane
- last academical
- entire impromptu
- pithy and practical
- lengthy and boring
- usually lengthy
- annual philosophical
- private but severe
- last, embarrassing
- inopportune and ineffectual
- erudite antiquarian
- sensible, aristocratic
- last anatomical
- prosaic historical
- brief, condescending
- sanitary and social
- embarrassingly mawkish
- eloquent and interesting
- largest tiered
- lurid and stern
- longest and most cryptic
- monthly anti-drug
- elegant moral
- fraternal and paternal
- high-pitched, ten-minute
- dull undergraduate
- intelligent and edifying
- tedious, overbearing
- grave and unimpeachable
- civilized feminine
- perfectly grave and unimpeachable
- chemical and agricultural
- bright missionary
- immortal popular
- final physiographical
- inimitable moral
- tiresome, moral
- daily popular
- abstruse explanatory
- awfully noble
- delightful, historical
- beautiful impromptu
- truly valuable and instructive
- daily clinical
- able introductory
- physical, pneumatical
- extremely eloquent and popular
- ordinary and cursory
- extremely eloquent
- next, public
- pedantic geological
- public experimental
- good, heart-to-heart
- _critical and practical
- self-righteous and insulting
- important theosophical
- agitatorial
- free descriptive
- heathen, moral
- geoplatylogical
- respectful moral
- beautiful and highly instructive
- miscellaneous introductory
- numerous and rather prosy
- smart but misleading
- singularly vigorous and original
- previous lengthy
- dry, drawn-out
- semi-monthly public
- admirable gratuitous
- sixth inaugural
- interesting academical
- single professorial
- _anatomical and mechanical
- political or anti-slavery
- systematic and clinical
- instructive historic
- stupid prosy
Popular Searches
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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