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 expense
Below is a list of describing words for expense. 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 expense:
- vain modern
- military considerable
- suitable annual
- calamitous medical
- outright blatant
- flagrant and unnecessary
- tedious vain
- total mail-order
- bitter and oppressive
- easy prodigal
- annual additional
- considerable and unavoidable
- infinite and most laborious
- additional and unreasonable
- useless and enormous
- scarcely additional
- tasteless, impotent
- steady, large
- present and ordinary
- poor much
- also considerable and unavoidable
- real, out-of-pocket
- logically unjustifiable
- extraordinary annual
- moderate and limited
- certain sky-high
- needless and wasteful
- needless and embarrassing
- great computational
- periodic significant
- fabulous extra
- great and almost ruinous
- considerable and quite needless
- utterly needless and monstrous
- needless and monstrous
- superfluous and inexcusable
- hospital and medicinal
- excess and great
- evident needless
- principal additional
- frightful and generally ruinous
- considerable higher
- reasonable or necessary
- dollars--annual
- excess and vain
- much probable
- serious and needless
- appalling previous
- enormous and very foolish
- indirect or overhead
- safe, discreet
- considerable out-of-pocket
- needless and disagreeable
- enormous and surely unnecessary
- heavy, unwarrantable
- minimum extra
- annual necessary
- military current
- great and very inconvenient
- respectably heavy
- wicked and needless
- greater certain
- probable and comparative
- unnecessary or extra
- ridiculous and unwarranted
- proportional initial
- least needless
- fresh, inevitable
prodigal - continual and useless
- fresh and heavy
- barely nominal
- full and royal
- probable enormous
- limited and trifling
- greater annual
- least national
- great and additional
- enormous and unnecessary
- greater original
- new and unbounded
- fraction--total
- ruinously disproportionate
- biggest overhead
- old unchecked
- terrible philosophical
- deep-pocket
- unlimited in-house
- total normal
- considerable and useless
- annual overhead
- incidental and unavoidable
- unnecessary national
- heavy previous
- vast and superfluous
- large and perpetual
- enormous, cruel
- direct overhead
- extra initial
- considerable intermediate
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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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