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 contention
Below is a list of describing words for contention. 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 contention:
- gentle and most honorable
- sharp wordy
- useless and obstinate
- eager but good-natured
- chief modernist
- long but unjust
- grievous, troublesome
- frank and persistent
- keen and copious
- logical and tenable
- main abstract
- subterranean, fatal
- old and unsettled
- wholly laudable and reasonable
- hot and even riotous
- chief and most valid
- barren stark
- smug and confident
- fierce and undying
- probably bitter
- acrimonious and warlike
- fresh vexatious
- crass contemporary
- eternal irreconcilable
- chief and most puzzling
- plausible and damaging
- habitual inner
- desperate and interminable
- illogical and unfair
- grammatico-political
- extreme empirical
- violent and unceasing
- arrogant and unreasonable
- bitter scientific
- incred\-ibly bitter
- subsequent bull-headed
- laudable and reasonable
- mild but resolute
- bitterest partisan
- continual, nagging
- ever exciting
- customary amicable
- usual illogical
- profoundly childish
- endless destructive
- noble and profitable
- incredibly bitter
- wholly laudable
- angry partisan
- strange parallel
- ferocious political
- angry and scornful
- main actual
- amicable little
- vain and endless
verbal - mere partisan
- much wearisome
- sturdy and wholesome
- old and tiresome
- troublesome and tedious
- vast metaphysical
- bitter mutual
- palpably absurd
- long and sore
- public legal
- mere wordy
- much violent
- arbitrary and baseless
- utterly untrue
- furious and implacable
- old platonic
- high and fierce
- loud and vehement
- thy childish
- selfish, greedy
- long and stern
- much angry
- great civil
- always vigorous
- hard and fierce
- much generous
- much noisy
- fierce and wild
- long and vain
- sudden and excessive
- present unexpected
- better such
- much eager
- simple and comprehensive
- frequent and serious
- vain and childish
- zero-sum
- such sorrowful
- ancient baronial
- whole revolutionary
- intersectional
- old and common
- further remarkable
- whole romantic
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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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