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 habitats
Below is a list of describing words for habitats. 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 habitats:
- pristine or prehistoric
- nicer orbital
- single non-military
- more earth-orbital
- pseudo-arboreal
- less coastal
- artificial but cozy
- large-mammal
- distinct environmental
- suitable orbital
- grassy, dusty
- natural aquatic
- semi-arid, rocky
- nearest complete
- complete tropical
- nominally non-military
- purportedly civilian
- mobile underwater
- personal unnatural
- natural mammal
- natural watery
- semi-arid and arid
- modular orbital
- upland and humid
- extremely rude and ignorant
- adjacent preferred
- northern natural
- possible woodland
- invariably inhospitable
- open, semiarid
- total suitable
- important herpetological
- adjacent suitable
- continuous, semi-isolated
- |real native
- essentially sandy or muddy
- northern inshore
- essentially sandy
- newly favorable
- continuous, aquatic
- homogeneous grassy
- continuous boreal
- suitable boreal
- almost optimum
- rocky and decidedly tropical
- inhospitable and inconvenient
- different adjacent
- mysterious technological
- superficially compatible
- shabby one-room
- precious civilian
- immense distant
- later circular
- small and specialized
- enormous, artificial
- whole pseudo-arboreal
- mid-sized orbital
- military-commercial
- available orbital
- natural and native
- open, seasonal
- maddeningly impersonal
- domed, transparent
- primal, disquieting
- self-sufficient planetary
- avowed natural
- orbital second-stage
- grashal
- newer, modular
- innermost human
- lush and spacious
- state-of-the-art technological
- artificial large
- former mennonite
- wide toroidal
- false but tangible
- unequaled human
- horizontal lunar
- fragmented large
- mammoth incomplete
- various mammal
- earthly undersea
- upland grassy
- resultant artificial
- truly arid
- oversized artificial
- various self-contained
- modular underwater
- little family-run
- natural final
- seemingly desirable
- extensive favorable
- probably marginal
- decidedly tropical
- little mobile
- small, high-tech
- dark unnatural
- strange distant
- thirty-foot tall
- eminently favorable
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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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