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 antiquity
Below is a list of describing words for antiquity. 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 antiquity:
- genuinely abysmal
- tremendous and sinister
- primitive or fabulous
- sheer appalling
- pure and marmoreal
- simple or venerable
- pre-hyphenial
- wrinkled and premature
- hidebound financial
- dingy and meaningless
- blasphemous and indescribable
- primaeval and heathen
- altogether abysmal
- altogether immemorial
- unknown pagan
- remotest heroic
- well-known and great
- highest fabulous
- oriental or pagan
- creakingly venerable
- strange and dead
- metrical or immetrical
- wholly immemorial and primitive
- wholly immemorial
- positively immemorial
- ancient and positively immemorial
- ancient sylvan
- vast and undated
- colonial and ecclesiastical
- remote neolithic
- however unanimous
- picturesque, mysterious
- high fabulous
- remote and historic
- remote, prehistoric
- rude and unknown
- extreme geological
- undefined remote
- always vital and splendid
- ago biblical
- undisputed geological
- one-horse wooden
- remotest and most venerable
- unknown but obviously high
- venerably remote
- deep and far-fetched
- substantial and pretty entire
- extreme and primeval
- high and even apostolic
- grey and mysterious
- extreme and rude
- practically immemorial
- sad and unkempt
- remoter or higher
- probable relative
- considerable geological
- great and almost indefinite
- dark and prehistoric
- remote and stupefying
- dim pre-college
- noble and strenuous
- remote pagan
- respectable but uninteresting
- afraid prehistoric
- mysterious and splendid
- remote and fabulous
- original and great
- immemorial and primitive
- heartless, petrified
- much remoter
- well-nigh immemorial
- unrelieved and almost biblical
- fabulous and historical
- enormous or incalculable
- highest probable
- classic or gothic
- vague and legendary
- primæval and heathen
- vital and splendid
- shadowy unsubstantial
- indeed unknown
- solemn and mystic
- high geological
- remote and dim
- remote and religious
- most remote
- high, cloudy
- primitive and pre-mediaeval
- high and racy
- administrative and juridical
- german heathen
- such pyramidal
- vain and credulous
- similar rich
- mysterious and universal
- indefinitely remote
- classical and gothic
- remote and rude
- just chronic
- great but uncertain
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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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