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 astronomer
Below is a list of describing words for astronomer. 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 astronomer:
- staid, pedantic
- small, humorous
- humble junior
- illustrious danish
- formerly royal
- careful, hardworking
- newly respectable
- unnamed egyptian
- senior planetary
- watchful, enthusiastic
- scientific swedish
- poetical european
- brilliant danish
- ingenious danish
- inaccurate belgian
- practical or observational
- skillful french
- slightly crestfallen
- chipper senior
- visibly bemused
- airy, royal
- slightly inflated
- famous and reputable
- great famous
- wise british
- french mathematical
- diligent and judicious
- dour and skeptical
- aristocratic royal
- excellent and laborious
- persistent lunar
- famed and great
- eminent danish
- egyptian or babylonian
- skilful practical
- great danish
- famous danish
- skilful french
- famous and renowned
- soft-spoken little
- french-born
- great sidereal
- ancient mathematical
- rather respectable
- curious and accurate
- well-known dutch
- eminent and worthy
- good sparkling
- somewhat vain
- eminent swedish
- marvellously acute
- famous polish
- profound practical
- illustrious italian
- famous egyptian
- late well-known
- eminent practical
- internationally renowned
- royal swedish
- noted
- ancient danish
- eminent irish
- nineteenth-century british
- witty and eloquent
- eminent british
- famous german
- unfortunate french
- late illustrious
- famous italian
- new and young
- well-known french
- late, great
- eminent french
- true and great
- hard and dry
- exceedingly poor
- young dutch
- perfectly orthodox
- famous dutch
- renowned french
- internationally famous
- present imperial
- ordinary young
- great french
- famous french
- intense young
- estonian
- danish
- great dutch
- eminent italian
- famous royal
- observational
- great german
- young and active
- famous foreign
- eminent german
- french royal
- thoroughly modern
- now-deceased
- lilienthal
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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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