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 landmarks
Below is a list of describing words for landmarks. 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 landmarks:
- scenic and devastating
- familiar and sordid
- famous and most curious
- joyfully various
- immovable, intangible
- chief bony
- prominent and definite
- distinguishable or even prominent
- great, ambiguous
- conspicuous, far-famed
- suspiciously unfamiliar
- another--signal
- immemorial and immovable
- away familiar
- unfailing and unimpeachable
- recognizable and serviceable
- great sculptural
- well-defined and visible
- avignon--dismal
- conspicuous and reliable
- plain and distinctive
- striking and indestructible
- other photogenic
- still unchanged
- plain and durable
- sacred and time-honored
- important symbolic
- extraordinary, unexplainable
- prominent domestic
- geo�graphical
- topo\-graphical
- large, immutable
- theonly certain
- distinctive and remarkable
- long-term societal
- religious or architectural
- minor beloved
- sole clear
- domed, historical
- impressive and famous
- prominent historic
- pylons—festival
- familiar and safe
- mnemo-technical
- conspicuous and useful
- certain mnemo-technical
- obvious and continuous
- splendid and familiar
- tallest and most striking
- ordinarily steadfast
- exceptional geological
- old few
- prominent geological
- prominent and well-known
- terribly conspicuous
- fine, striking
- striking and distinct
- important or characteristic
- notable natural
- ancient and essential
- past familiar
- single familiar
- few lunar
- next festival
- fairly static
- ancient and inviolable
- finest historic
- peculiar, hazy
- down sacred
- apparently unattainable
- historic and architectural
- old chronological
- grand, simple
- simply convenient
- little exterior
- old-fashioned literary
- eternal moral
- chronological and geographical
- prominent bony
- cultural and historic
- familiar, grim
- notable local
- well-known and prominent
- national natural
- clearest mental
- several infallible
- ancient hallowed
- ancient and familiar
- certain complex
- lexical
- moral and national
- beautiful and conspicuous
- ancient parochial
- national historic
- safe familiar
- architec�tural
- good and certain
- ancient, well-known
- beautiful ancestral
- bizarre orange
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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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