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 historian
Below is a list of describing words for historian. 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 historian:
- keen ethnic
- great and universally popular
- modern and national
- partial and malignant
- indeed explicit and vehement
- indeed explicit
- industrious and lucid
- grave, well-informed
- ancient and rather apocryphal
- anonymous local
- somewhat mendacious
- eloquent and graphic
- renowned maritime
- credulous or partial
- impartial ecclesiastical
- cynical literary
- constitutional or patriotic
- picturesque and partisan
- impartial french
- equally unfaithful
- fairest and most unbiased
- intelligent secular
- latest native
- philosophic and accurate
- judicious and acute
- exceedingly dogmatic
- excellent and very elegant
- capable and pleasant
- competent personal
- trustworthy monkish
- contemporary and national
- judicious and disinterested
- twenty-five-year-old literary
- favorite nautical
- presently grand
- traitorous imperial
- solitary but mute
- spurious, imaginary
- judicious and great
- veracious and most unromantic
- impartial and accurate
- august, french
- late animated
- authentic and judicious
- remarkably fair and impartial
- graphic british
- laborious topographical
- eminent franciscan
- thoroughly contemporary
- able local
- able and admittedly impartial
- admittedly impartial
- brilliant, unscrupulous and daring
- statist and colonial
- ingeniously emotional
- wilfully hostile
- greatest infidel
- wonderfully conscientious
- considerate and able
- impartial and highly respectable
- sensible well-versed
- facile and felicitous
- favorite, facile and felicitous
- elegant and immortal
- still scanty and imperfect
- lesser nineteenth-century
- dramatic and inconvenient
- wonderfully copious and veracious
- wonderfully copious
- copious and veracious
- jealous portuguese
- cardinal and ecclesiastical
- general and philosophic
- sensitive and fallible
- eighteenth-century ecclesiastical
- far-famed local
- mythical dutch
- faithful monkish
- local armenian
- mere nationalist
- careless and heartless
- foremost jewish
- respectable ecclesiastical
- ingenious and speculative
- french rationalist
- popular so-called
- studious and faithful
- amiable modern
- other and dispassionate
- illustrious swiss
- chief and scientific
- suspiciously imaginative
- swedish literary
- amiable and laborious
- pleasant and observant
- too-partial
- painful and voluminous
- painstaking, veracious
- roomy, chief
- stern pragmatic
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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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