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 coals
Below is a list of describing words for coals. 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 coals:
- red, smokeless
- small, unsubstantial
- high-grade bituminous
- good bituminous
- else dead
- old, soggy
- kennal
- least hot
- cherry or soft
- purest fossil
- bituminous and lignite
- best bituminous
- recent bituminous
- lignite or low-grade
- low-grade bituminous
- highest volatile
- soft or bituminous
- most bituminous
- cheapest and smallest
- expensive, free-burning
- low-grade western
- hard bituminous
- lignite, bituminous
- thin, impure
- true bituminous
- fragile hot
- filthy cheap
- few ruddy
- mid hot
- alive, hazel
- hotly glaring
- certain bituminous
- few tertiary
- natural charred
- veritable scriptural
- high volatile
- many bituminous
- ordinary bituminous
- free-burning
- older australian
- intense, dead
- fourth less
- cheap or dear
- little sullen
- few, dim
- few unburned
- visible, twin
- heavily bearded and past
- bituminous
- clear hot
- huge livid
- few brisk
- small and smoky
- certain impure
- unnaturally cool
- down fiery
- lignite and bituminous
- few hot
- red hot
- certain norwegian
- simply black
- hot and bright
- bright and fragrant
- especially hot
- few lurid
- raw red
- finest and purest
- few red
- hot
- dark hot
- so-called hot
- small smoky
- clear bright
- dull reddish
- various typical
- few dim
- lignite
- fairly hot
- furiously hot
- dull and sullen
- large, expensive
- red red
- small reddish
- red molten
- enough hot
- clear, red
- many hot
- fine hot
- clear, hot
- real red
- fresh hot
- tiny, distant
- clear red
- bright clear
- already dead
- bright hot
- apply hot
- still red
- cherry colored
- many fiery
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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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