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 etiquette
Below is a list of describing words for etiquette. 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 etiquette:
- subtle, divine
- spanish inquisitorial
- further miserable
- scarcely professional
- delicate but strict
- strange, mexican
- certain clannish
- stilted, careful
- vice\_regal
- regular amorous
- somehow improper
- needless, trivial
- incarnate charnal
- --paoli--ambassadorial
- however formal
- unfortunately military
- protocol--royal
- nevertheless imperative
- unwritten but nevertheless imperative
- strict and conventional
- stiff arbitrary
- good book-buying
- bad, literary
- general, parliamentary
- formal danish
- often canine
- unbreakable royal
- elementary diplomatic
- formal tribal
- mature social
- cold spanish
- strict academical
- exquisitely complex
- remotely proper
- punctiliously formal
- endless chinese
- rigid funeral
- lay--medical
- jealous and scrupulous
- proverbial spanish
- intensely strict
- strong javanese
- foolish and humiliating
- ostentatious, self-seeking
- strict spanish
- comparatively strict
- horrible, irksome
- patriarchal social
- complex and ancient
- present, strict
- excruciatingly correct
- old-fashioned hungarian
- whole special
- strictly diplomatic
- unwritten social
- stern and strict
- commonplace conventional
- heirarchical
- simply medical
- excellent net
- unnecessary social
- afghan social
- medi�val british
- mediaeval british
- strict naval
- shadowy moral
- hitherto inviolate
- stern spanish
- refined native
- dull and laborious
- proper and universal
- exacting and fastidious
- rigorous medical
- now strict
- cold military
- strict formal
- own sacrosanct
- quite royal
- ultra-formal
- strict professional
- correct religious
- clumsy, heavy-handed
- frivolous human
- down native
- strictly oriental
- rigid mental
- ridiculous social
- ancient formal
- unnatural and monstrous
- empty and meaningless
- national and official
- stiff and pompous
- usual rigid
- british or canadian
- certainly correct
- harsh and rigorous
- rigid ecclesiastical
- canine and feline
- correct social
- proper verbal
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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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