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 cathedrals
Below is a list of describing words for cathedrals. 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 cathedrals:
- noble, towering
- countless gothic
- far aloof
- metropolitical and diocesan
- overpowering and splendid
- unsurpassed gothic
- romanesque gothic
- other thirteenth-century
- grandest and most appropriate
- grand, gothic
- important archiepiscopal
- solemnly grand
- incredible gothic
- principal gothic
- greatest gothic
- soulless, secular
- beloved spanish
- glorious gothic
- primitive gothic
- gothic french
- noble and exquisitely beautiful
- splendid and inimitable
- massive and towering
- grim gothic
- great fortress-like
- older portuguese
- great immemorial
- noble and gigantic
- great gothic
- green and cool
- few proven�al
- few provencal
- many grander
- grandest gothic
- vast glorious
- finest gothic
- magnificent gothic
- enormous gothic
- rich and high
- gigantic and splendid
- green natural
- more mediaeval
- maybe ancient
- beloved medieval
- cold, majestic
- other proven�al
- miniature gothic
- spanish gothic
- largest gothic
- richest gothic
- early maritime
- oldest and grandest
- other provencal
- so-called gothic
- gothic
- vast and sombre
- metropolitical
- venerable gothic
- primary gothic
- romanesque and gothic
- still incomplete
- old gothic
- common canadian
- big gothic
- great medieval
- many gothic
- other old-time
- new virtual
- sundry important
- ancient gothic
- graceful gothic
- oldest and finest
- thy gray
- other gothic
- many unfinished
- fewer new
- german gothic
- fine romanesque
- drowsy old
- old northern
- early gothic
- northern french
- great, gorgeous
- ancient spanish
- great open-air
- famous portuguese
- wonderful french
- gorgeous italian
- gloomy gothic
- great continental
- other spanish
- high gothic
- great mediæval
- small gothic
- later gothic
- preindustrial
- silent, dark
- vast and wonderful
- great, towering
- other maritime
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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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