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 mercantile
Below is a list of describing words for mercantile. 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 mercantile:
- perfervidly concrete
- often sedentary
- regular and often sedentary
- large and marvellously successful
- definite great
- unavoidably deranged
- unfit, more
- useless german
- great and mutually beneficial
- various prosperous
- powerful and adventurous
- modestly sizeable
- enterprising and extensive
- shrewd, adroit
- stiff, frosty
- certain cooperative
- british ocean-going
- opulent and influential
- recent respectable
- enterprising and good
- large and very successful
- brawny british
- rough ancient
- other savvy
- extensive or extravagant
- now characteristic
- huge historic
- |mental, intelectual
- former austro-hungarian
- marvellously successful
- influential native
- foreign-trade
- principal wholesale
- powerful and impatient
- bitter and protracted
- considerable and valuable
- regular and usual
- somewhat precise
- judicious and successful
- rival italian
- |mental
- active german
- best retail
- large and pretentious
- great private
- less praiseworthy
- old and well-established
- glorious british
- modern swedish
- largest and most successful
- ancient and wealthy
- oldest and strongest
- entire present
- vast new
- largest british
- european and oriental
- active and industrious
- other eligible
- several european
- such fundamental
- land-based
- great wholesale
- entire british
- great rich
- wealthy and influential
- many wealthy
- long and successful
- large european
- mutually beneficial
- large and profitable
- transoceanic
- fairly extensive
- great italian
- fairly successful
- many rich
- whole british
- remarkably successful
- non-official
- british colonial
- several great
- less extensive
- mid-sized
- other international
- selected
- many great
- small-town
- ocean-going
- highly respectable
- wealthy
- wealthiest
- prosperous
- largest and finest
- wholesale
- austro-hungarian
- hard, cold
- few young
- few great
- brisker
- shuttered
- old british
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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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