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 cottage
Below is a list of describing words for cottage. 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 cottage:
- peculiarly captivating
- low but loyal
- drunken, ancient
- ancient tottering
- fearsomely archaic
- antique gray
- particularly neat and clean
- tiny but very clean
- somewhat blocky
- toxic pink
- franciscan urban
- white, timbered
- crazy dirty
- smallest but prettiest
- low, hump-backed
- little thatched-roof
- dilapidated swiss
- two-room wooden
- little but neat
- charming and snug
- vile ruinous
- democratic senatorial
- queer shadowy
- neat and picturesque
- cosy, vine-embowered
- draughty, tumbledown
- surprisingly usual
- luxurious pink
- electrical regional
- broken-down rental
- unique old-world
- low and straight
- painfully prim
- quite interesting and adventurous
- baked, warm
- humble and dirty
- tiny magenta
- old intramural
- somewhat irregular and uncertain
- stale suburban
- pleasant snug
- little, snow-white
- neat and pretty dutch
- lowliest and most dismal
- small but particularly neat
- eligible, little
- compact, convenient
- low-priced, elegant
- cheap two-room
- tiny open-work
- humble white-washed
- snug western
- small, three-room
- tiny but very neat
- fairly clean and respectable
- cramped but habitable
- tumbledown ruinous
- prettiest swiss
- charming black-and-white
- suburban wooden
- little, two-story
- commonplace square-built
- lonely three-cornered
- one-room deep
- certainly large and roomy
- pleasant rent-free
- dreary three-room
- neat but old-fashioned
- tiny and already rickety
- quasi-rural
- old-fashioned and quasi-rural
- cosy red-brick
- humblest, commonest
- miserable suburban
- neat but very small
- unkempt, rough and tough
- neat but small
- long, ramshackle
- little bright-green
- tiny, unkempt
- picturesque timbered
- little three-room
- rather run-down
- poetical little
- real swiss
- good-looking, split-level
- small, durable
- little three-bedroom
- small, four-room
- small three-room
- veritable two-story
- neatly timbered
- fine two-story
- neat walled
- classic seaside
- horrible dilapidated
- small and clean
- sterile seaside
- inconvenient rickety
- shabby four-room
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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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