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 custom
Below is a list of describing words for custom. 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 custom:
- genetically stupid
- ancient and judicious
- annual and superstitious
- fierce patrician
- singular, local
- long-standing ethiopian
- invariant local
- old ghoulish
- absurd and proud
- horses--royal
- white horses--royal
- immutable provincial
- wretched inhuman
- primitive and national
- solitary royal
- irrational and anomalous
- apparently irrational and anomalous
- ancient but obsolete
- commendable and generous
- strong and desirable
- ethiopian political
- decent and meritorious
- ancient laudable
- evil and discourteous
- pernicious and impious
- singular and inconvenient
- senseless and inconvenient
- usual laudable
- later matriarchal
- hideous and heathen
- inane and stupid
- detestable and atrocious
- usual orgiastic
- atrocious tartar
- whimsical and pleasing
- foolish habitual
- old, easier
- ungrateful italian
- merry annual
- laudable, acceptable
- lazy modern
- present gentle
- easy and strong
- delightful local
- weird local
- ancient and commendable
- venerable and agreeable
- pleasant, olden
- old-fashioned tartar
- universal metropolitan
- horrid and senseless
- practical japanese
- unnatural and unwarrantable
- common and whimsical
- curious and somewhat barbarous
- seemingly quaint
- unwarrantable and barbarous
- old, reverent
- early celtic or teutonic
- traditional and constant
- peculiar and nasty
- recent, historic
- riotous and ludicrous
- contrary ill
- current barbarous
- warlike and similar
- inhuman superstitious
- constant and laudable
- frequent german
- fashionable and fantastic
- curious triennial
- singular feudal
- foolish or horrid
- warlike and correct
- objectionable and most ridiculous
- whimsical and inflexible
- patriarchal italian
- ancient and praiseworthy
- invariably prevalent
- vile babylonian
- ancient and rigid
- foolish and indelicate
- vintage, phoenician
- older and harsher
- curious bolivian
- wretched, inhuman
- interesting biennial
- entirely un-american
- daily classic
- charming local
- ancient and laudable
- outmoded and barbarous
- curious and apparently inexplicable
- usual babylonian
- unwarrantable and unnatural
- old draconian
- venerable naval
- frightful and degrading
- barbaric and sacrilegious
- useless and primitive
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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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