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 debate
Below is a list of describing words for debate. 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 debate:
- hectic internal
- spirited and acrimonious
- long and rancorous
- second joint
- less-than-intellectual
- sixth joint
- increasingly astringent
- interminable and inconclusive
- super-colossal, gigantic
- fierce ecclesiastical
- fourth joint
- meaningless and offensive
- fierce and unavailing
- casually surreal
- fairly strident
- fierce scientific
- garrulous, nonsensical
- usual wrenching
- volatile current
- bruising ideological
- candid and universal
- useless and windy
- fifth joint
- combative political
- pointless so-called
- gigantic congressional
- highly circular
- immense procedural
- boring and fruitless
- forensic or parliamentary
- acrimonious parliamentary
- antiquarian and acrimonious
- noisy and hot
- animated and protracted
- tolerably irregular
- furious and acrimonious
- angry and animated
- eager and secret
- sometimes acrimonious
- infinite painful
- fast inner
- standard philosophic
- long and often savage
- lengthy tactical
- colossal, gigantic
- gut-wrenching internal
- prime-time political
- lightning-fast moral
- worth everyday
- intense and spirited
- slightly hot-tempered
- longest and most animated
- private and animated
- outspoken and wide-ranging
- extraordinarily outspoken and wide-ranging
- extraordinarily outspoken
- free congressional
- obscure and giddy
- principally open-air
- long and principally open-air
- refusal, long
- short and uninteresting
- hot and critical
- endless wide-ranging
- useless and humiliating
- dim, unproved
- futile and humiliating
- warm and interesting
- irregular, desultory
- protracted and sometimes acrimonious
- long and somewhat spirited
- hot and acrimonious
- trifling but wordy
- formal and acrimonious
- long and warm
- interesting pedagogical
- resourceful and evasive
- warm and tedious
- lengthy and sharp
- violent and contentious
- warm and acrimonious
- therefore condensed and direct
- therefore condensed
- wholesome and edifying
- desultory and warm
- protracted congressional
- famous and critical
- blasphemous and revolutionary
- serious connubial
- long-standing geographical
- indubitably dull
- animated and indignant
- instructive parliamentary
- extremely long and dull
- critical and brave
- anxious internal
- lengthy and acrimonious
- scandal and disagreeable
- general acrimonious
- political and factional
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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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