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 controversy
Below is a list of describing words for controversy. 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 controversy:
- merely unsubstantial
- unhappy sectional
- vain interminable
- particular forensic
- nice and important
- long and hitherto barren
- protracted and deeply exciting
- impolitic and ill-fated
- so-called iconoclastic
- warm and voluminous
- inpolitical and sectarian
- dishonest and acrimonious
- bitter and perhaps fruitless
- fierce, nation-wide
- intricate and frequently dangerous
- long christological
- great epistemological
- warm and acute
- historical, theological
- acrid and ridiculous
- feverish religious
- fatal iconoclastic
- wearisome paschal
- chief scholastic
- obstinate physico-mathematical
- famous paschal
- bitter iconoclastic
- surest and most past
- theological or rather philosophical
- puritanical iconoclastic
- bald negative
- difficult and ancient
- protracted constitutional
- so-called paschal
- byzantine iconoclastic
- famous and bitter
- good-natured and urbane
- interminable and most bitter
- fierce dialectical
- undying agrarian
- memorable theological
- bitter and seemingly irreconcilable
- interminable and fierce
- great deistical
- somewhat unimpassioned
- protracted and sorrowful
- atrocious ecclesiastical
- fierce and endless
- sectarian and theological
- current and quite unmalicious
- quite unmalicious
- religious, ecclesiastical
- always ephemeral and vulgar
- always ephemeral
- honest and subtle
- vigorous recent
- grand protestant-papal
- protestant-papal
- impending sectional
- distant and lesser
- sharp and combative
- somewhat sharp and combative
- narrow-minded, malicious and stupid
- fiercely unintelligible
- unattractive ecclesiastical
- stupid or ridiculous
- forensic or academic
- bitterest theological
- anxious diplomatic
- angry and dangerous
- long and not unheated
- fierce and indecent
- vigorous and scurrilous
- windy, wordy
- interminable and barren
- disgusting and most idle
- ardent and even bitter
- purely political or general
- superfluous and hopeless
- old-world technical
- vexatious and protracted
- active and almost acrimonious
- lengthy but fruitless
- hot and ceaseless
- stubborn dogmatic
- inglorious and ruinous
- esquimaux--philosophical
- hot temporal
- vital and entirely inconclusive
- fierce but ridiculous
- next territorial
- emotional literary
- wearisome national
- unjustified and ungracious
- great christological
- strict forensic
- rancorous sectional
- memorable sectional
- actual synergistic
- exasperated theological
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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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