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 labor
Below is a list of describing words for labor. 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 labor:
- total indigenous
- severe manual
- hard manual
- heavy manual
- toil-mechanical
- exacting involuntary
- brazilian renewal
- chinese cheap
- hard, menial
- spirited, unflagging
- australian democratic
- uninterrupted, faithful
- arduous manual
- unremitting and intense
- despairing literary
- historically communist
- melancholy hard
- solitary and melancholy hard
- hard, manual
- cheap, uncomplaining
- monopoly free
- skilled or common
- capital and cheap
- relentless, tedious
- efficient but more
- merry common
- worst menial
- incessant and unassisted
- energetic free
- lithuanian democratic
- hard and ignoble
- hard physical
- steady and ferocious
- heavy but relatively simple
- basic unskilled
- tedious and servile
- menial manual
- hard penal
- practically unskilled
- ordinary unskilled
- infinite, toothless
- regular thirteenth
- infinite editorial
- cheap asiatic
- pastoral and literary
- female manual
- zeal and pains-taking
- capital and skilled
- enormous basic
- grindingly hard
- essentially unpaid
- hard, protracted
- menial, hard
- unlimited, skilled
- repetitive manual
- forbidden-physical
- especially menial
- essential, mundane
- physical or manual
- human manual
- skilled and competent
- proportionately trifling
- diseased or totally past
- skilful, courageous
- well-educated and skilled
- else hard
- monotonous manual
- aside manual
- voluntary and extraordinary
- improperly severe
- crudest agricultural
- small herculean
- healthy and measurable
- rugged manual
- less unpaid
- common, unskilled
- hard or constant
- obviously productive
- voluntary and unskilled
- menial and severe
- solitary and delightful
- specialized much
- always expensive and wasteful
- cheap manual
- sad, childlike
- effective migrant
- just unpaid
- certain and steady
- rough manual
- frequently frustrating
- much and too hard
- mundane, difficult and dangerous
- sweaty manual
- deeply specialized
- risky, unpaid
- menial unskilled
- routine and hard
- huge and willing
- effectively unskilled
- alternate manual
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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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