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 college
Below is a list of describing words for college. 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 college:
- first-class female
- royal normal
- royal veterinary
- medical benevolent
- south-eastern agricultural
- hospital medical
- royal dramatic
- gigantic medical
- agricultural and sylvicultural
- central technical
- good northeastern
- medical or literary
- presidential electoral
- agricultural and mechanical
- fancier private
- *agricultural and horticultural
- *agricultural
- --national medical
- typically decadent
- local junior
- profitable academic
- sinister white-walled
- royal agricultural
- cantonal technical
- metaphysical medical
- barrette, irish
- big high-class
- medical eclectic
- usually cheerful and unselfish
- few compulsory
- royal technical
- whole electoral
- deaf mute
- normal and industrial
- presbyteral
- usually cute
- swedish nautical
- small denominational
- mostly gorgeous
- enough junior
- best nicipal
- new decemviral
- colored southern
- well-organized modern
- cathedral, military
- veritable marischal
- reputable veterinary
- memorial technical
- empty ecclesiastical
- normal and mechanical
- old-time academic
- ethical and industrial
- oriental theological
- post-graduate theological
- secular irish
- thoroly reputable
- western normal
- run-down female
- denominational or non-denominational
- real peppery
- small but husky
- one-horse denominational
- |agricultural and mechanical
- |agricultural
- one-horse western
- darn conservative
- ~agricultural and mechanical
- equally athletic
- modest but convenient
- botanical medical
- usually inspiring
- average well-equipped
- cathedral, federal
- old and truly respectable
- central, undenominational
- archiepiscopal theological
- western coeducational
- other, marischal
- incipient western
- international benedictine
- hospital, diocesan
- local puritan
- western co-educational
- _national medical
- central veterinary
- complete apostolic
- spiritual administrative
- former diocesan
- typical coeducational
- non-residential theological
- last, marischal
- national obstetrical
- one-sided, classical
- high infernal
- fresh, solitary
- young, up-to-date
- largest denominational
- hospitable and sociable
- blank coeducational
- bogus medical
Popular Searches
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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