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 development
Below is a list of describing words for development. 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 development:
- puberal
- superior cranial
- forward economic
- explosive technological
- extensive atomic
- authentic integral
- full alphabetic
- fine frontal
- gradual, harmonious
- true and viable
- peaceful nuclear-power
- rapid industrial
- spiritual, esthetic and intellectual
- preferable realistic
- extraordinary and limitless
- systematic and yet economical
- uneven regional
- full-scale terrestrial
- incipient mammary
- free and systematic
- mindless, runaway
- full cranial
- lovely evolutionary
- one-sided and premature
- religious toleration--internal
- fine phrenological
- high phonetic
- present-day electrical
- highest and most harmonious
- frequent defective
- laborious, one-sided
- all-round physical
- broad-based economic
- higher theistic
- revival and further
- bitter, logical
- organic or systematic
- market-oriented economic
- regional economic
- fast physical and mental
- reptilian predatory
- great or even considerable
- inevitable linguistic
- complete psychosomatic
- enough urban
- solely technological
- spontaneous serial
- rapid and uncontrollable
- immense harmonic
- self-contained causal
- most overseas
- skilful irish
- famous frontal
- phenomenal industrial
- fullest and most self-sustaining
- economic, educational and social
- unsettling medical
- precocious and extraordinary
- surprising, unrealistic
- cultural or scientific
- careful, well-organized
- externally normal
- longer postnatal
- embryological neural
- costly mathematical
- fruitless and costly mathematical
- latest fascinating
- free technological
- surprising but perfectly logical
- excited--gradual
- higher transatlantic
- equal muscular
- instead vigorous
- much and high
- pacific social
- normal, economic
- rapid sexual
- fuller functional
- leaf-work--gradual
- artistic leaf-work--gradual
- poor muscular
- gradual historical
- natural or rather inevitable
- morbid or monstrous
- back ambitious
- unfavorable and regrettable
- excessive or imperfect
- subsequent marvelous
- scientific educational
- healthy, permanent
- humanistic physical
- nascent muscular
- immediate and often surprising
- low, tardy
- especially incomplete
- abnormal or especially incomplete
- rapid and amazing
- cultural, economic and industrial
- harmonious personal
- necessarily progressive
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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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