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 ordering
Below is a list of describing words for ordering. 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 ordering:
- wealthiest criminal
- procedural stand-by
- royal victorian
- passionately spiritual
- terrible and inviolable
- particular biographical
- modern uppermost
- planetary dispersal
- easy repetitive
- truer social
- strict alphabetical
- austere martial
- delicate ranking
- holy military
- maybe chronological
- holy monastic
- time-fairly short
- nondiscretionary
- ancient & mystical
- communal social
- deliberate and rather deep
- intellectually low
- metanational global
- approximately chronological
- arbitrary selfish
- residual dark
- presidential direct
- practical and rationalistic
- unnatural and retrograde
- optimistic new
- alphabetical
- proper chronological
- strict chronological
- mystic fraternal
- meticulous good
- general and peremptory
- particular cloistered
- unhurried and impersonal
- considerate old-fashioned
- tiniest residual
- urgent general
- familiar and chatty
- strictly consecutive
- degraded clerical
- intangible and dubious
- favorable royal
- distant sophisticated
- primitive clerical
- fresh and healthier
- curt and positive
- solid, systematic
- nice annual
- gratifyingly short
- benevolent and protective
- starkly uneven
- deepest and most fundamental
- patriarchal, male-dominated
- devastatingly short
- noble or equestrian
- stray imperial
- public responsible
- total and impersonal
- jewish monastic
- imaginary but regular
- tidy alphabetical
- crisp but quiet
- official dispersal
- rigid socialistic
- valiant and venerable
- unprecedentedly violent
- different and peculiarly unedifying
- exuberant and tremendous
- distinct or methodical
- instinctive and childish
- purely mystic or spiritual
- privileged and inviolate
- political or satirical
- no-capital corinthian
- economic constitutional
- chronological
- unnatural and preposterous
- direct, top-priority
- specific, unambiguous
- discriminatory social
- lofty and unusual
- tighter professional
- terse, sudden
- biologically convenient
- clear hands-off
- universal and applicable
- old, unjust
- immense and unitary
- implacably logical
- sharp disembodied
- merely cosmic
- exemplary religious
- whole equestrian
- involuntary monastic
- irregular and confusing
- quite simple and practical
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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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