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 locality
Below is a list of describing words for locality. 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 locality:
- gay and salubrious
- limited and rather inaccessible
- first-mentional
- last appropriate
- oriental and foreign
- poor and even dangerous
- singularly desolate
- less plush
- choicest botanical
- convenient seaside
- central and commonly agreeable
- unusual or ancient
- well-known and questionable
- lone and ever sweet
- somewhat rough and remote
- dry and sufficiently warm
- certain arthurian
- stubborn central
- distant and special
- salubrious but sandy
- historic and attractive
- airy and healthful
- habitable but even desirable
- neutral and accessible
- equally neutral and accessible
- unsafe and unsavory
- modest or remote
- comparatively modest or remote
- previous northernmost
- northernmost marginal
- squalid and impoverished
- safe or attractive
- sweetly rural
- beautiful and sweetly rural
- interesting but most pestilential
- suspicious and disreputable
- same unsheltered
- own approximate
- particularly dry and hot
- out-of-the-way and inaccessible
- essentially sacred
- circumscribed geographical
- artistic and fashionable
- exciting and precarious
- flat, uninviting
- commonly agreeable
- fruitful and healthy
- unchanged old
- rough and remote
- present uninteresting
- stupid, tedious
- other emerald
- far nebulous
- favorite residential
- fresh and strange
- dingy and poverty-stricken
- |interorbital
- safe or dangerous
- distinctive single
- fairly shady
- certain unfashionable
- vaguely definite
- advantageous and beautiful
- unknown or uncertain
- clean, spacious
- salubrious and pleasant
- moist, swampy
- fitting and convenient
- equally neutral
- central sacred
- untropical
- immediate geographical
- singularly remote
- rather circumscribed
- particular favorite
- other unattractive
- ungeographical
- equally improper
- new marginal
- ancient and most interesting
- strictly fenced
- picturesque and unique
- quiet pastoral
- interesting botanical
- least famous
- definite and practicable
- rather inaccessible
- single diseased
- appropriate and natural
- exclusively white
- interesting fossil
- interesting ethnological
- barbarous and pagan
- intricate and obscure
- fertile and healthy
- quaint and unique
- horribly poor
- poor but decent
- fine healthful
- poor and populous
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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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