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 badger
Below is a list of describing words for badger. 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 badger:
- swift, high-class
- eloquent, dear
- grey female
- strong unimaginative
- valiant, harmless
- fat and somber
- normally placid and slow
- fat and festive
- exceedingly persuasive and appropriate
- always nearer and dearer
- rabid female
- berserk white
- big, blustery
- huge warlike
- mighty female
- possibly feral
- large and possibly feral
- morose, savage
- two-inch flat
- terrible grey
- baldish old
- exceedingly persuasive
- leery old
- bad and malicious
- big practical
- always nearer
- regal old
- solitary grey
- rather miraculous
- strongest and wisest
- wicked and deceitful
- ravenously hungry
- high ancient
- hefty young
- cute old
- huge female
- sleepy young
- strong fresh
- big, simple
- ancient female
- huge armored
- old female
- huge male
- petty official
- great male
- belly-up
- cool old
- beautifully striped
- full-grown male
- fully armored
- big, dumb
- wise and courageous
- normally placid
- large male
- double-helix
- grey old
- old male
- clever, clever
- old striped
- young female
- big male
- canny old
- pug-nosed
- great and wise
- big ole
- crusty old
- poor innocent
- berserk
- blustery
- sturdy young
- few clear
- old grey
- poor harmless
- shrewd old
- worn-out old
- same brown
- brown and black
- young male
- cross-eyed
- sturdy little
- tall young
- gray old
- wise old
- cunning old
- great white
- old gray
- old fat
- rabid
- big old
- great and mighty
- generaal
- beautiful young
- fat old
- huge white
- female
- fine young
- aberrant
- half-grown
- rampant
- dearer
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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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