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 holidays
Below is a list of describing words for holidays. 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 holidays:
- lazy, long
- _national
- nice luxurious
- yearly high
- further lunatic
- long illicit
- naughty and wearisome
- universal annual
- good whole
- non-dominical
- exciting and special
- other non-dominical
- fantastically enjoyable
- planetary religious
- yearly local
- precious occasional
- much-needed three-hour
- bimestral
- transiently opulent
- religious or special
- festival and general
- annual universal
- amusing but tragic
- short and precious
- grand danish
- short, much-needed
- continual festival
- gay and spotlessly clean
- unbroken sunny
- pastoral and golden
- solar and seasonal
- fabulous four-day
- brief and frugal
- good, restful
- brisk four-day
- unnecessary but quite delightful
- local socialist
- minor but pleasant
- lesser jewish
- glorious cuban
- few and pleasant
- special three-day
- precious delightful
- incredible high-flying
- rather long-delayed
- rather protracted and exciting
- irrepressible youngest
- festival and public
- new canting
- fortunate rare
- cheap and charming
- better nor happier
- small truant
- lifelong joyous
- restful and satisfactory
- real open-air
- enjoyable whole
- unusual and very acceptable
- bright, welcome
- lovely whole
- intentionally untechnical
- later seaside
- real delightful
- long and very cheap
- hard-earned annual
- inexpensive and enjoyable
- comparatively inexpensive and enjoyable
- grand whole
- free and lawless
- fairly careless
- fairly careless and idle
- short-lived, delicious
- delightful truant
- apply national
- greatest rural
- special parochial
- special and unnecessary
- bright exceptional
- extra whole
- new but less
- long open-air
- of-ficial
- influential national
- year-end
- ready-made pagan
- traditional seaside
- month-long european
- customary cut-price
- glorious, carefree
- latest overseas
- short luxurious
- occasional insane
- stupid four-day
- high annual
- perennial and pointless
- riotously popular
- short, one-man
- old transient
- luxurious and enjoyable
- _legal and local
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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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