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 colonies
Below is a list of describing words for colonies. 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 colonies:
- remote basic
- massively primitive
- separate, successful
- ex-penal
- furthest human
- new and rather rustic
- separate, self-governing
- nearest penal
- merely dependent
- dubious independent
- new and mostly human
- asteroid penal
- fashionable orbital
- farthest viable
- shabby, illicit
- ramshackle spanish
- penal agricultural
- squeaky, noisy
- now far-flung
- oldest extraterrestrial
- pure asteroidal
- seventh illegal
- thereon foreign
- sociologically viable
- weak, unorganized
- important, wealthy
- such self-governing
- fundamentally uninhabitable
- brand-new human
- industrial mechanized
- self-governing british
- simple coral
- hominidal
- secret nudist
- several nascent
- earlier interstellar
- numerous territorial
- unknown, illegal
- less well-financed
- powerful and most numerous
- several self-governing
- always tolerant and loyal
- revolting spanish
- rich and most extensive
- free autonomous
- noble and productive
- british autonomous
- singularly sad and interesting
- sovereign, separate and independent
- unstable spanish
- separate british
- single bacterial
- entire prefab
- great australasian
- one-time british
- earlier lost
- entire multiracial
- nastiest and most immoral
- old one-way
- other mid-atlantic
- comparatively raw and new
- minor and comparatively major
- secret and well-established
- comparatively major
- independent former
- now free and independent
- former nudist
- considerable german-speaking
- former correctional
- hairy irregular
- deserving little
- whitish bacterial
- unhealthy british
- tough warty
- intrusive irish
- discontinuous, small
- heterogeneous foreign
- eighteenth-century proprietary
- autonomous british
- chartered and proprietary
- far-off penal
- unknown and unmolested
- permanent portuguese
- dependent distant
- long-established italian
- mainly agricultural and mineral
- brightest bacterial
- opulent and proud
- numerous and civilised
- cylindrical or spheroidal
- apparently large and influential
- british continental
- feeble and oppressed
- great autonomous
- faithful and warlike
- orbital and lunar
- cash-starved
- british self-governing
- decent penal
- self-sustaining inorganic
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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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