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 authority
Below is a list of describing words for authority. 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 authority:
- constitutionally limited
- centralized, world-wide
- little brief
- gentle, habitual
- irresponsible and involuntary
- eminent astronomical
- obligational
- international astronautical
- highest constitutional
- civil peacekeeping
- occasional appellate
- central monetary
- afghan interim
- final dogmatic
- shadowy and imaginary
- prodigious actual
- next transitional
- strict but civilized
- french or papal
- arbitrary or hereditary
- proper provincial
- blue tidal
- regal and paternal
- independent and uncontrollable
- concurrent and coequal
- hereditary or self-appointed
- temporary and inappropriate
- overwhelming and irrational
- ironclad military
- traditional or scriptural
- sovereign and dictatorial
- interim political
- all-powerful and undisputed
- absolute and almost sovereign
- distinct and preponderating
- distinct higher
- competent regulatory
- presidential stand-by
- other and complete
- literally unlimited
- civil and paternal
- military or aristocratic
- high and orthodox
- nearest and most authentic
- ultimate alien
- arbitrary and boundless
- corrupt worn-out
- permanent and skilled
- unquestioned and direct
- once temporal and spiritual
- ostensible central
- superior or absolute
- tribunal or public
- new obligational
- rightful local
- appropriate governmental
- equal papal
- crisp and sharp
- parental or scholastic
- judicial and sacerdotal
- permanent centralized
- disapproval and masculine
- common supranational
- ultimate, central
- unbounded and inexplicable
- nearest competent
- dry and unquestionable
- utter, unquestionable
- hence ultimate
- highest rabbinical
- corrupt, worn-out
- paramount civil
- vast prescriptive
- peremptory external
- much rotund
- overbearing parochial
- little paramount
- intuitive, eagle-eyed
- old-fashioned paternal
- pure infallible
- concrete sovereign
- unimpeachable ecclesiastical
- legal revolutionary
- coercive or legislative
- competent governmental
- down hierarchical
- autocratic diocesan
- unlimited sovereign
- stern and unsympathetic
- rather hermaphroditical
- arbitrary but legal
- great--parental
- old-fashioned or doubtful
- unconditional, unlimited
- ancient and decisive
- generally official
- unquestionably conservative
- divine and providential
- genial and complacent
- graceful but resolute
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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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