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 africa
Below is a list of describing words for africa. 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 africa:
- french equatorial
- british central
- western equatorial
- coastal, western
- senegal western
- floor-to-ceiling deepest
- portuguese southern
- central equatorial
- equatorial and southern
- eastern equatorial
- central inter-tropical
- yellow hot
- captive thorough
- belgian, italian and portuguese
- savage and mystical
- semi-tropical or tropical
- unexplored central
- barbarous central
- east equatorial
- german southwestern
- barbary and central
- equatorial western
- dear, central
- western and inner
- total portuguese
- south-eastern and tropical
- portuguese central
- unfamiliar and distant
- western and west-central
- western, central and eastern
- particularly fine and brilliant
- southern and unexplored
- natal and tropical
- central intertropical
- exceedingly delicate and arduous
- western tropical
- east tropical
- subjugated northern
- eastern tropical
- tropical western
- tropical and southern
- savage, ancient
- now bleak and snowy
- french occidental
- darkest and most barbarous
- sultry and weary
- highly beneficial and advantageous
- southern extra-tropical
- darkest equatorial
- equatorial, northern and western
- dark, heathen
- western or central
- double sub-saharan
- northern and northeastern
- east-central and southern
- long downtrodden
- german central
- ancient, black
- dusky, naked
- unknown central
- penetrating central
- central and eastern
- total italian
- spanish central
- deepest and darkest
- biggest modern
- total french
- italian and portuguese
- east and central
- awful, silent
- total spanish
- southern central
- modern black
- east central
- western and central
- central or western
- southern or eastern
- central and southern
- now bleak
- total german
- northern central
- darkest and deepest
- late twentieth-century
- dark and benighted
- present tropical
- eastern and southern
- same alternate
- tropical and sub-tropical
- central and western
- eastern and central
- eastern central
- independent black
- northern and central
- total british
- east-central
- civilized and enlightened
- tropical and subtropical
- highly beneficial
- poor heathen
- vast and mysterious
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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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