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 lessons
Below is a list of describing words for lessons. 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 lessons:
- early sunday-school
- permanent, memorable
- gratis french
- own, basic
- perilous italian
- quick but loud
- bitter and important
- imaginary clinical
- emphatic gastronomical
- last indoor
- awful and instructive
- brief and perceptive
- simple, rock-ribbed
- profound and painless
- quick and very humiliating
- oft-repeated tactical
- colder, uglier
- bi-weekly french
- careful, self-imposed
- unfriendly taxonomical
- excess, many
- sad prosy
- history--moral
- simple and equally plain
- natural history--moral
- greater and salutary
- dry, absolute
- stern but valuable
- plain and everlastingly true
- everlastingly true
- doctrinal or symbolical
- additional and essential
- daily german
- sweet nameless
- instructive french
- briefly horrid
- humiliating but necessary
- earliest survival
- fatal and facile
- difficult and exhilarating
- great disciplinary
- dae-monically difficult
- primary substantial
- harder and sharper
- useful but bitter
- spiritual, political and historical
- grave or magnanimous
- kindred rude
- vital journalistic
- forceful and penetrating
- solemn and salutary
- political, philosophical or moral
- special and priceless
- capital simple
- harsh but valuable
- possible, great and valuable
- resolute persistent
- profitable and far-reaching
- astonishing and exciting
- artistically indirect
- whimsical and irreverent
- hopeful moral
- formal tutorial
- last and humblest
- additional proper
- mighty and mournful
- quite compact
- sharp and compelling
- incorporating biochemical
- new and lethal
- especially sanitary
- great and much-needed
- broad theological
- carefully painful
- imperishable, --eternal
- carefully painful and bloody
- powerful and reverent
- nude spear-throwing
- many and impressive
- hard but valuable
- proper second
- sharp additional
- extremely portentous
- cold, salutary
- resolutely consistent
- instructive and solemn
- solemn and useful
- however uneasy
- tolerably didactic
- sad, disquieting
- open, significant
- great and indelible
- botanical and moral
- smart and salutary
- innumerable and vital
- short but fitting
- hard but useful
- dominant and most impressive
- own delinquent
- sharp but necessary
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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