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 festivals
Below is a list of describing words for festivals. 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 festivals:
- triennial musical
- periodical or annual
- enjoyable annual
- biennial musical
- sierra--rural
- innocent sunny
- heathen nocturnal
- same incestuous
- seasonal, periodic
- chief periodic
- rucal
- solstitial and stellar
- lunar or agricultural
- astral and agricultural
- annual principal
- political memorial
- frequent and pompous
- such bibulous
- provincial musical
- triumphal religious
- incessant extraordinary
- principal solemn
- joyous rural
- mammoth musical
- australian erotic
- seasonal ritual
- popular orgiastic
- seasonal and agricultural
- ritual and magnificent
- splendid and exhilarating
- social or sacred
- cognate pagan
- several pre-christmas
- various pre-christmas
- periodic musical
- seasonal erotic
- equally interesting and curious
- religious erotic
- rhenish musical
- burlesque quasi-religious
- infant-baptismal
- splendid and ridiculous
- many semi-annual
- dramatic and orgiastic
- rustic but poetic
- corresponding pagan
- autumnal vintage
- characteristic burmese
- temples--funeral
- famous occasional
- wild bacchanal
- fifth, public
- past domestic
- seasonal religious
- occasional large-scale
- gorgeous musical
- quinquennial religious
- quadriennial and biennial
- periodical religious
- terrible barbaric
- greater pagan
- traditional seasonal
- main seasonal
- world-famous dramatic
- frantic ancient
- numerous connubial
- official musical
- solemn and annual
- rustic and agricultural
- big nine-day
- gay pastoral
- communal or tribal
- well-nigh pagan
- great dionysian
- thy triennial
- great inter-tribal
- annual musical
- solemn jewish
- principal peruvian
- quieter little
- important athenian
- superb outdoor
- italian open-air
- principal republican
- certain agrarian
- curiously imaginative
- great pentateuchal
- norwegian patriotic
- respective great
- ecstatic musical
- originally religious
- official egyptian
- quadriennial
- important outdoor
- annual rural
- mainly ecclesiastical
- ~musical
- all-night religious
- babylonian and jewish
- brilliant and generous
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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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