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 cultures
Below is a list of describing words for cultures. 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 cultures:
- pure alien
- deep, whole
- beloved democratic
- stable pastoral
- adequate and wide
- human ovarian
- enormously profligate
- servile pseudo
- down high-tech
- esthetic human
- dank rural
- marvelous, warlike
- lethal bacterial
- purely aerial
- many anti-industrial
- energetic, alive
- excessively clannish
- homogenous national
- highly admirable
- mid and high-tech
- mock slow
- dominantly homosexual
- rich, nuclear-tipped
- technologically incipient
- decadent and hedonistic
- cosmopolitan and imperial
- wildly alien
- rival high-tech
- complex diversified
- viable and pure
- paramilitary, semifeudal
- apparently patriarchal
- virile and alien
- intensely virile and alien
- cruel, brilliant and malicious
- brilliant and malicious
- physical, intellectual and practical
- alien and unknowable
- wonderful dual
- possible high-tech
- unified, high-level
- old-style tribal
- sophisticated magnetic
- truly heraldic
- larger, cooperative
- present-day tribal
- proud common
- suave scientific
- intelligent inhuman
- simplified material
- rich and exemplary
- moldy bacterial
- galactic utilitarian
- self-centered xenophobic
- also tibetan
- turkish and also tibetan
- humanistic and even scientific
- devastatingly superior
- competitive retail
- conservative primitive
- techno-terrestrial
- staggeringly different
- so-called throwaway
- original ovarian
- rich cooperative
- irredeemably inferior
- irredeemably inferior and secondary
- totally nontechnological
- nasty dead-end
- stable and docile
- essentially puritanical
- frantically active
- other black-white
- workable planetary
- non-monarchical
- autocratic, dictatorial
- monstrous and unspeakable
- spurious and partial
- higher and true
- broad and up-to-date
- expressive physical
- sufficient classical
- naive communal
- ancient matriarchal
- nascent planetary
- cruel cannibal
- many preindustrial
- makeshift and abnormal
- high-tech matriarchal
- mature, technological
- multiracial ancient
- same intact
- somewhat unitary
- seventy-seven standard
- short-lived bacterial
- primitive matriarchal
- other and often better
- corrupt male-dominated
- brisk and progressive
- diffuse galactic
Popular Searches
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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