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 decadence
Below is a list of describing words for decadence. 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 decadence:
- wholesale regional
- maybe sequential
- gradual, certain
- subsequent and punctual
- ultimate slow
- long and contemptible
- --physical and moral
- gradual religious
- mankind--general
- strange and progressive
- rapid and final
- irremediable and fatal
- aside pretentious
- old-fashioned, german
- splendidly effete
- ineffably attractive
- artful authentic
- dull impoverished
- rich, corrupt
- religious, social and economic
- further speedy
- progressive and continuous
- sad and inevitable
- certain chic
- truly foul
- moral and technical
- darkly romantic
- progressive mental
- speedy and inevitable
- whole pathetic
- deep dramatic
- popular and national
- commercial and naval
- permanent moral
- similar religious
- little civilized
- obvious political
- same lavish
- much moral
- --commercial
- --physical
- real economic
- wild, fierce
- own corrupt
- quite genuine
- complete moral
- slow and gentle
- scientific and philosophic
- national and political
- underprivileged
- gradual
- seemingly hopeless
- western-style
- moral and material
- elitist
- sequential
- moral and intellectual
- intellectual and physical
- moral and spiritual
- more palpable
- irremediable
- imitative
- spiritual and intellectual
- still lower
- general social
- long, warm
- less complete
- moral
- rapid
- certain religious
- senile
- pointless
- religious and moral
- punctual
- such miserable
- moral and physical
- physical and moral
- social and religious
- armorial
- little apparent
- post-war
- capitalist
- political and military
- economic and political
- unabated
- progressive
- social and economic
- byzantine
- good old-fashioned
- intellectual
- more rapid
- depraved
- regional
- utter
- heady
- moral and religious
- floral
- deplorable
- incipient
- spiritual
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
