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 civil war
Below is a list of describing words for civil war. 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 civil war:
- tedious and ruinous
- savage and perpetual
- tremendous and premature
- unnecessary and injurious
- bloody and divisive
- lengthy and damaging
- bloody and senseless
- hopeless and destructive
- seemingly dreadful
- expensive and memorable
- thoroughgoing and relentless
- almost endemic
- dynastic and other
- probably full-scale
- protracted and bloody
- incipient and real
- uncommonly vicious
- insidious and stealthy
- bloody but short
- protracted and fratricidal
- else terrible
- dull and brutal
- bloody and calamitous
- immediate or widespread
- bloody and universal
- miserable and disastrous
- frightful and revolting
- protracted and disastrous
- bloody and unequal
- exceptionally bloody
- frequently open
- desperate and inveterate
- quarrelsome and sentimental
- dangerous and extensive
- tumultuous and bloody
- long and momentous
- fiercest and bloodiest
- lengthy and bloody
- formal and open
- altogether unimportant
- new and disastrous
- particularly messy
- obstinate and bloody
- bloody and terrible
- long and bloody
- multisided
- bloody and bitter
- long and destructive
- long and disastrous
- cruel and destructive
- great and bloody
- bloody and desperate
- bitter and protracted
- bloodiest
- gigantic and terrible
- vast and terrible
- nine-year
- life-and-death
- more nor less
- north-south
- protracted
- somewhat protracted
- impending
- outright
- lebanese
- small and private
- secret or open
- long and perilous
- epochal
- endemic
- full-scale
- long and terrible
- palestinian
- miltonic
- all-out
- devastating
- long-running
- fratricidal
- extremely violent
- bloody
- undeclared
- highly unpleasant
- five-year
- short-lived
- divisive
- late
- long and bitter
- ten-year
- disastrous
- flagrant
- factional
- blue and gray
- long-standing
- ongoing
- ruinous
- robotic
- three-year
- particularly unpleasant
- incipient
- deplorable
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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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