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 materialism
Below is a list of describing words for materialism. 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 materialism:
- enough dialectical
- amiable and devout
- marxist dialectical
- truly quaint
- crass and sensual
- frank philosophic
- supercilious and hollow
- rampant and brutal
- rampant and cancerous
- hard, gross
- clamorous and brutal
- whole, historical
- concrete and strict
- objectionable moral
- logical dogmatic
- peculiarly sordid and repulsive
- ideal preventive
- sleepy smug
- cruelly colossal
- vigorous and very creditable
- sufficiently functional
- particular, philosophic
- questionable philosophic
- cynical scientific
- vague and revolting
- crass and literal
- cold-blooded humanitarian
- sordid and cynical
- vulgar, conservative
- bare and prosaic
- metaphysical mechanical
- splendid, radiant
- dialectical and historical
- cynical and disgusting
- hardy, humorous
- terrible colossal
- rigid old-fashioned
- unconscious habitual
- deep original
- hard, apathetic
- hard and gross
- consistent and vigorous
- utter blind
- subtly complex
- away gross
- sordid and repulsive
- dank and dusty
- prevalent cynical
- elegant or cynical
- gross, unblushing
- gross and destructive
- godless modern
- practical and even dogmatic
- selfish and aggressive
- same cancerous
- mechanical french
- dull and blind
- hard and dour
- downright pagan
- primitive naturalistic
- naturalistic french
- thoughtless social
- easy-going, selfish
- gross and crass
- scientific or physical
- same crass
- unusually coarse
- utter cold
- rabid and far-reaching
- crudest eighteenth-century
- despicable moral
- dangerous and degrading
- gross and brutal
- grossly sensuous
- gross and contemptible
- peculiarly sordid
- strictly corresponding
- strange mediaeval
- ever aggressive
- gross practical
- “brutal
- exclusively mechanical
- cold and irrational
- endlessly clever
- sordid, brutal
- whole despicable
- brutal and vulgar
- so-called philosophic
- rather truculent
- gross and revolting
- miserable and sordid
- dialectical
- gross and stupid
- hyperrational
- serious and lofty
- hard and barren
- rather defiant
- old gross
- crassest
- same raw
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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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