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 practices
Below is a list of describing words for practices. 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 practices:
- decent and kindly internal
- kindly internal
- perhaps macabre
- bizarre and perhaps macabre
- unwritten tribal
- lucrative medical
- concurrent, unbroken
- dubious corporate
- good fiscal
- male, such
- standard anthropological
- senseless and monstrous
- monstrous, obscene
- dishonest and sharp
- particularly wet and muddy
- common and most unphilosophical
- gross rich
- amatory and superstitious
- good anthropological
- constitutional and customary
- odious, abhorrent
- mutual and usual
- moderately expectant
- government--piratical
- lawful and constant
- rich legal
- standard and open
- odd ceremonial
- odious and criminal
- corrupt or illegal
- playful but objectionable
- dangerous and sinful
- unholy religious
- accurate and constant
- severest religious
- possibly long and tedious
- socially unjust
- else invariable
- dirty and vile
- hospital and outdoor
- natural and present
- pagan and abominable
- obscure ritual
- frequent, disturbing
- past despicable
- generally inadvisable
- abhorrent sexual
- solid private
- other kosher
- primitive, unhealthy
- extra-legal or illegal
- harsh, unremitting
- barbarous, cruel and obscene
- common but foolish
- diabolical and mischievous
- traditional communist
- vicious and unjustifiable
- secret ancestral
- improper and unsound
- indeed convenient and popular
- predatory and monopolistic
- dangerous and demeaning
- unfair and coercive
- successful and lucrative
- corrupt and illegal
- subsequent galactic
- dour, cautious
- loquacious, good
- sordid, outrageous
- lunar legal
- baroque amatory
- late unforeseen
- tawdry political
- frequent maternal
- abusive and destructive
- daily systematic
- older savage
- savage magical
- puerile and superstitious
- mischievous or absurd
- shady and illegal
- medical and pharmacal
- outrageous and rebellious
- simpler and bolder
- puerile and frivolous
- ignoble european
- anti-professional
- invariable modern
- sundry privy
- extensive provincial
- electoral sharp
- old-fashioned commercial
- obscene and incestuous
- inadequate agricultural
- objectionable preventive
- diplomatic sharp
- unfair and fraudulent
- decent and praiseworthy
- small but remunerative
- continual and constant
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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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