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 merchants
Below is a list of describing words for merchants. 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 merchants:
- wealthy pro-communist
- ambitious but notoriously cheap
- wealthy and pompous
- occasional commoner
- evasive old
- itinerant finnish
- simple, two-story
- gentle and radiant
- more smalltime
- paunchy, unshaven
- computer-controlled pseudo
- cautious and upright young
- small-fry, petty
- stately egyptian
- shrewd, watchful
- bespectacled male
- respectable and otherwise sensible
- rich, smug
- diligent and enthusiastic
- successful antique
- mostly disreputable
- second olive
- influential and highly respectable
- obliging spanish
- shrewd and civil
- rich, peace-loving
- middling and lesser
- intelligent moorish
- grocery-store and mysterious
- well-known coal
- earliest canadian
- eminent and very rich
- deceased western
- black, retail
- unlucky dutch
- great anglo-jewish
- regular and conscientious
- welcome, rich
- overweight, paunchy
- sorry dutch
- fraudulent olive
- skittish and quarrelsome
- well-off local
- undistinguished chinese
- wealthy but discreet
- soft ole
- decent but ordinary
- sundry traitorous
- prosperous coal
- credulous moorish
- greater, wiser
- notable phoenician
- closest reliable
- respectable, bearded
- unsuccessful common
- also great and famed
- common phoenician
- truly industrial
- bearded phoenician
- chinese wholesale
- respectable peruvian
- middle-aged and serious-minded
- shrewd itinerant
- wealthy phoenician
- richest native
- pitiful, wretched
- small but extremely valuable
- solid, earthy
- huge, obese
- considerable wholesale
- influential and honorable
- stubborn, suspicious
- richest and most successful
- tremely wealthy
- cheap wholesale
- rather dimwitted
- successful, well-established
- well-known and floridly attired
- apparently civilian
- wealthy and fortunate
- less bucolic
- fat, murderous
- mercenary petty
- extravagant local
- few malleable
- well-to-do foreign
- canny, unscrupulous
- wealthy and extremely influential
- ruthless, successful
- foolish, green
- rapacious and interested
- indignant, bearded
- wealthy bulgarian
- suddenly irate
- particularly retail
- exceedingly fearful
- own nor foreign
- nearby prominent
- generous montreal
- agreeable portuguese
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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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