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 erudition
Below is a list of describing words for erudition. 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 erudition:
- profound nautical
- exact classical
- great casuistical
- curious and dazzling
- massive and conscientious
- perverse and curious
- shallow scholastic
- merely pseudo-philosophical
- mock modern
- great or even excessive
- adequate and still respectable
- numismatic and lapidary
- quaint and not despicable
- immense comparative
- mathematical and theological
- classical, mathematical and theological
- prodigal and somewhat indiscriminate
- classical and formal
- pleasingly sentimental
- much anecdotal
- recondite mythological
- great miscellaneous
- arcane alien
- much pedantic
- historical and astronomical
- ponderous theological
- recondite legal
- profound antiquarian
- indeed solid
- zeal and uncommon
- requisite historical
- sophomorical
- profound and laborious
- extensive philosophical
- precious and perishable
- wide and penetrating
- profound and refined
- heavy and tasteless
- much philological
- classical and scholastic
- considerable classical
- much classic
- immense and profound
- much second-hand
- thorough theological
- profound and extensive
- extraordinary and exquisite
- biblical and scientific
- antiquarian and topographical
- much anatomical
- great antiquarian
- rare and eminent
- profound biblical
- own unwieldy
- profound and exquisite
- particularly classical
- various and profound
- otherwise aimless
- profound and admirable
- always judicious
- much geographical
- remarkable ecclesiastical
- somewhat indiscriminate
- extensive and profound
- curious and out-of-the-way
- rare and profound
- much out-of-the-way
- theological and legal
- mere soulless
- somewhat inappropriate
- same slender
- sacred and profane
- profound and general
- extensive and accurate
- solemn and pompous
- extraordinary general
- false and ridiculous
- profound artistic
- vast literary
- less dead
- pure and healthful
- dead and sterile
- large and comprehensive
- superior medical
- wide and liberal
- still respectable
- such ripe
- own exuberant
- exact legal
- great and fine
- profound legal
- classical and scientific
- somewhat stupid
- pseudo-philosophical
- vast and profound
- much classical
- rare and difficult
- dry and sterile
- truly colossal
- little genuine
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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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