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 pretensions
Below is a list of describing words for pretensions. 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 pretensions:
- forward ridiculous
- ostentatious and obvious
- idiotic and sordid
- regal and papal
- lofty and not unreal
- sundry architectural
- athletic undergraduate
- vain and loud
- squalid, bare
- down insolent
- high-toned false
- extravagantly aristocratic
- impossible, historical
- poor empirical
- unspecified social
- aggressive or uncordial
- much obsolete
- uncompromising sacerdotal
- preposterous and incredible
- similarly messianic
- lower such
- absurd and most unjust
- barren and false
- absurd and insufferable
- good-natured moral
- flagrant and impudent
- foolish academic
- extravagant and hopeless
- considerable architectural
- ridiculous and inflated
- good-natured, moral
- smallest legitimate
- trivial or serious
- extravagant and groundless
- obsolete insane
- noisy literary
- high logical
- hypocritical, hollow
- innocent rustic
- unreasonable and ill-advised
- uncertain thy
- draconian and unexpected
- particular classical
- truly draconian and unexpected
- high, majestical
- practical or urgent
- mystical and ridiculous
- ambitious and disgusting
- fraudulent hebraic
- ambitious and far-reaching
- superior but still illegal
- ill-conceived, unreasonable
- supernatural and malign
- monstrous and baseless
- fair and seemingly sincere
- absurd and most monstrous
- extreme and contrary
- unpopular and invidious
- futile and unfounded
- imply sanctimonious
- vast and extravagant
- unfounded and highly wicked
- vast or extravagant
- late, extravagant
- pertinent national
- ill-timed and boastful
- humanitarian and even optimistic
- seigneurial or ecclesiastical
- humble architectural
- increasingly exorbitant
- exorbitant theoretical
- absolutely royal
- superior architectural
- greater aristocratical
- forward sacerdotal
- rationalistic and authoritative
- available ancient
- overweening and imprudent
- trivial but annoying
- sociologically creative
- florid, fruitless
- former arrogant
- unwarranted and dangerous
- withered and bloodless
- bald, withered and bloodless
- lofty and ridiculous
- religious and fair
- absurd, shameless
- fewer ducal
- feigned and frequently malicious
- same extra-judicial
- insulting and imperious
- literally boundless
- ecclesiastical and democratic
- intolerable feudal
- extreme and equal
- arrogant and ridiculous
- arrogant and exorbitant
- peremptory or exclusive
- magnificent dogmatical
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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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