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 ancestry
Below is a list of describing words for ancestry. 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 ancestry:
- portuguese and asian
- distant feline
- criminally defective
- collateral dutch
- predictive inverted
- probable unsavory
- obvious hispanic
- direct polish
- cost-conscious civilian
- royal and remotest
- prehistoric native
- likely literary
- royal and famous
- maybe swedish
- clearly carnivorous
- obvious african
- puritans--intellectual
- plainly miscellaneous and impromptu
- plainly miscellaneous
- royally religious
- tenacious and courageous
- primitive or even extinct
- indubitably democratic
- religiously royal
- oldest, noblest
- long rabbinical
- obscene canine
- eminent and political
- aristocratic and snobbish
- presumably danish
- only--dual
- =dual
- distant classical
- common, racial
- northern and feudal
- unmistakably reptilian
- honest bourgeois
- divine and mythical
- distant and exotic
- lower-animal
- distant asian
- mainly sicilian
- unquestionably italian
- highly european
- mainly oriental
- lofty and significant
- predominantly chinese
- tly chinese
- already illegitimate
- human, asian
- neanderthal deep
- darker african
- putative danish
- heavy latino
- mainly turkish
- pre-personal
- collective female
- long and ignoble
- gentle and aristocratic
- remote animal
- sturdy rural
- northern asiatic
- direct teutonic
- obscure eastern
- old or brilliant
- remote and illustrious
- distant human
- superior female
- partly supernatural
- remote native
- warlike human
- savage aboriginal
- japanese or korean
- much mexican
- pure and unstained
- own vertebrate
- less gymnastic
- common and classic
- common maternal
- legitimate french
- noble and resourceful
- purely middle-class
- pious imperial
- possible black
- freer and stronger
- italian and mexican
- remote terrestrial
- dark-haired asian
- possible jewish
- matrilineal genetic
- ancient and long-established
- less mediaeval
- ancient and disreputable
- irish and dutch
- ancient tartar
- fascinating irish
- own maternal
- wholly carnivorous
- strong asian
- ancient, savage
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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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