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 duty
Below is a list of describing words for duty. 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 duty:
- final sacrosanct
- arduous naval
- painful but imperative
- distressing and oppressive
- important or responsible
- delicate but necessary
- odd or hazardous
- spherical heavy
- onerous and boring
- irresistible and solemn
- delicate and highly responsible
- necessary and very important
- preliminary and paramount
- sometimes impracticable
- odious and sometimes impracticable
- high and indispensable
- holiest and most important
- paramount and most urgent
- inescapable and sacred
- voluntary active
- regular, necessary
- imperative and immediate
- imperative and indispensable
- imperative official
- maybe solitary
- elementary and profoundly important
- chivalrous and reluctant
- sublime and indispensable
- sacred and laborious
- own, heavy
- equal constant
- plain and imperative
- arduous and most painful
- imperative religious
- sacred and imperative
- highest mortal
- particular and respectful
- patriotic official
- unpleasant and intrusive
- high audacious
- longer owing
- covert active
- same and coeval
- arduous and repulsive
- practicable, extra and special
- painful but imperious
- present shallow
- dreary and impertinent
- irresistible and inspiring
- biennial social
- immediate, undeniable
- lively special
- succeed--social
- actually imperative
- voluntary military
- confidential and responsible
- now unenviable
- unaccustomed and most important
- invidious and hazardous
- solemn and frightening
- important regal
- important filial
- noble and disagreeable
- laborious official
- last pleasing
- high and irresistible
- disagreeable public
- doubly sacred
- lawful, civic
- vague, unperformed
- unfortunate current
- same stop-gap
- traditionally unpleasant
- boring and demeaning
- important but dull
- selfless moral
- general special
- limited full
- heterogeneous and unusual
- special but difficult
- clear and imperative
- separate or additional
- direct and obligatory
- ungrateful bureaucratic
- uncertain and maybe dangerous
- highly commendable and essential
- commendable and essential
- grim impossible
- curial or official
- military or active
- imperative, intellectual
- daring, steadfast
- daylong and lifelong
- urgent, compulsive
- family filial
- important and most offensive
- disagreeable and irksome
- imperative and sacred
- dreadful and wearisome
- responsible and painful
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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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