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 epidemics
Below is a list of describing words for epidemics. 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 epidemics:
- first-rate multiple
- periodic, worldwide
- general and involuntary
- queerest mental
- periodical annual
- always trivial
- widespread and virulent
- occasional and destructive
- major, long-established
- violent twin
- strange lingual
- ago tremendous
- inveterate, universal
- terrible puerperal
- tremendously disastrous
- infrequently mysterious
- universal and distressing
- moral and criminal
- appalling literary
- sentimental and matrimonial
- well-known suicidal
- recent and milder
- recent malignant
- extensive and fatal
- limited but very fatal
- totally unforeseen and unavoidable
- egotistic and less
- familiar acute
- several widespread
- extraordinary, unprecedented
- minor but virulent
- potential interplanetary
- widespread and fatal
- recent canine
- unmistakable local
- dangerous and deplorable
- probably periodical
- morbid, unhealthy
- great and probably periodical
- frankly foreign
- veritable mental
- acute tropical
- alleged occasional
- wildest and most ferocious
- distinct but minor
- certain imperceptible
- extremely fatal
- sudden singular
- recent fatal
- utterly mysterious
- vastly unpleasant
- extensive and destructive
- severe and fatal
- less devastating
- sufficiently popular
- fatal moral
- modern esthetic
- next severe
- extensive hospital
- unforeseen and unavoidable
- contagious and infectious
- acute gastric
- smaller and greater
- contemporary critical
- less widespread
- great, general
- exceedingly virulent
- exceptionally violent
- other convulsive
- sudden hideous
- sundry violent
- infectious or contagious
- contagious or infectious
- recent global
- singular spiritual
- new and horrible
- infectious and contagious
- such virulent
- several disastrous
- other dismal
- new and fatal
- other contagious
- malignant and dangerous
- meningococcal
- last and most fatal
- `moral
- curious psychic
- totally unforeseen
- citywide
- local or temporary
- last european
- serious and fatal
- short but severe
- violent inflammatory
- usual minor
- last severe
- true psychological
- slow-building
- just fancy
- psychical and physical
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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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