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 lecturing
Below is a list of describing words for lecturing. 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 lecturing:
- old-style public
- ineffective and stuffy
- lengthy and somewhat dull
- stilted sociological
- forrestal memorial
- stultifying and endless
- spirited and vividly profane
- vividly profane
- edifying and informative
- long and very useless
- professorial didactic
- last undelivered
- long and fairly technical
- stiffly professional
- long and arcane
- entire impromptu
- 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
- embarrassingly mawkish
- largest tiered
- longest and most cryptic
- elegant moral
- high-pitched, ten-minute
- intelligent and edifying
- grave and unimpeachable
- perfectly grave and unimpeachable
- bright missionary
- final physiographical
- tiresome, moral
- abstruse explanatory
- delightful, historical
- truly valuable and instructive
- able introductory
- extremely eloquent and popular
- extremely eloquent
- pedantic geological
- good, heart-to-heart
- self-righteous and insulting
- agitatorial
- heathen, moral
- respectful moral
- miscellaneous introductory
- smart but misleading
- previous lengthy
- semi-monthly public
- sixth inaugural
- single professorial
- political or anti-slavery
- instructive historic
- interesting catechetical
- daringly false
- clever pathological
- mild but very impressive
- famous and inexplicable
- instructive and patriotic
- instructive clinical
- expository or exegetical
- sharp good-natured
- acrid and dreary
- distressingly acrid
- distressingly acrid and dreary
- instructive and bright
- regular teetotal
- vehemently instructive
- unexpected but most interesting
- easy and striking
- consecutive presidential
- interminable compulsory
- amazingly dull
- impassioned ten-minute
- white neoclassical
- brief but stern
- lengthy political
- intolerable long
- extremely interesting and valuable
- deliberately protracted
- standard number-one
- fifteen-minute political
- long and incredibly boring
- brief canned
- fairly non-stop
- lengthy and quite dull
- extensive, wonderful
- tedious, sanctimonious
- brief, edifying
- friendly door-to-door
- well-organized, methodical
- long and rather unnecessary
- well-deserved little
- brief metaphysical
- page-long historical
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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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