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 costume
Below is a list of describing words for costume. 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 costume:
- politically tactful
- ceremonial damn
- obviously cheap
- simple and obviously cheap
- simple and witching
- sufficiently proper
- full aquatic
- ancient and very curious
- plain and pacific
- elegant but somewhat ideal
- semiliturgical
- admirable spanish
- outlandish calico
- extremely comfortable and serviceable
- otherwise seedy
- fanciful and picturesque
- nonformal
- alarming but effective
- barbarous and tasteless
- fanciful gala
- scott--national
- intentionally dowdy
- daintily simple
- strange byzantine
- startling and flashy
- rather plain and austere
- baggy comical
- nearly primitive
- careless dim
- picturesque national
- complete mexican
- strictly indigenous
- distinctive but almost obsolete
- local and antique
- neat nor gaudy
- serviceable and feminine
- thoroughly serviceable and feminine
- full black-and-white
- decanical
- general decanical
- winter-carnival
- showy and fanciful
- curious, old-time
- impossibly gaudy
- sufficiently grotesque
- loose antique
- conservative middle-class
- trivial french
- outlandish, piratical
- brilliantly barbaric
- vulgar, fancy
- authentic, everyday
- flashy nonexistent
- opulent illusory
- hateful modern
- peculiarly gaudy
- ingenious or best
- latest, eye-popping
- ornately brocaded
- quite simple and attractive
- white judicial
- effective but alarming
- antiquarian quaint
- oriental and antique
- merely showy or eccentric
- western masculine
- dirtiest and most careless
- turkish indoor
- picturesque but wild
- ancestral german
- ridiculous and fantastical
- full eastern
- inexpressibly sleek
- inexpressibly sleek and mournful
- sleek and mournful
- showy and effeminate
- fantastic and dressy
- old-time national
- delightfully symbolical
- picturesque but substantial
- full gymnastic
- cunning little-girl
- native and picturesque
- national, unartificial
- splendid or effective
- distinctly sombre
- distinctly sombre and severe
- full civilised
- brilliant and somewhat startling
- extraordinarily gorgeous
- gorgeous but loose
- full necromantic
- conspicuous and foppish
- coxcombical and eccentric
- extremely ornamental and picturesque
- full native
- magnificent oriental
- full gala
- sufficiently loose
- own disheveled
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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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