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 centuries
Below is a list of describing words for centuries. 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 centuries:
- early seventeenth
- early nineteenth
- early twenty-first
- eighteenth and early nineteenth
- early sixteenth
- early eighteenth
- early twentieth
- early thirteenth
- early fifteenth
- early twelfth
- early fourteenth
- later eighteenth
- early tenth
- later nineteenth
- sixth and sixteenth
- later twentieth
- great thirteenth
- fifteenth and early sixteenth
- whole eighteenth
- nineteenth
- great nineteenth
- early eleventh
- eighteenth
- mid twenty-first
- sixteenth
- other thirteenth
- seventeenth
- late eighteenth
- sixteenth and early seventeenth
- great eighteenth
- mid nineteenth
- earlier eighteenth
- sixteenth and seventeenth
- enlightened nineteenth
- late sixteenth
- later seventeenth
- twentieth and early twenty-first
- seventeenth and eighteenth
- fifteenth
- late thirteenth
- late seventeenth
- fourteenth and fifteenth
- terrible twentieth
- glorious nineteenth
- so-called nineteenth
- busy nineteenth
- later fourteenth
- fifteenth and sixteenth
- early eighth
- remarkable nineteenth
- later sixteenth
- other fifteenth
- late twentieth
- thirteenth and fourteenth
- late nineteenth
- old nineteenth
- best twenty-first
- enlightened eighteenth
- later thirteenth
- brilliant twentieth
- fourteenth
- nineteenth and early twentieth
- far-off nineteenth
- juvenile sixth
- early ninth
- earlier nineteenth
- thirteenth
- twelfth and thirteenth
- nineteenthearly twentieth
- thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth
- sceptical eighteenth
- eighteenth and nineteenth
- mid twentieth
- twentieth
- prosaic nineteenth
- seventeenth and early eighteenth
- great sixteenth
- early sixth
- other seventeenth
- solemn fifteenth
- italian, seventeenth
- late fifteenth
- whole nineteenth
- fourteenth and early fifteenth
- new twentieth
- thirteenth and early fourteenth
- whole twentieth
- olden musical
- wonderful thirteenth
- mid-twentieth
- wonderful nineteenth
- late twelfth
- sixth and early seventh
- so-called twentieth
- great seventeenth
- twentieth or early twenty-first
- ninth or early tenth
- old fourteenth
- early fifth
- late twenty-first
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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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