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 metals
Below is a list of describing words for metals. 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 metals:
- other nonferrous
- nonferrous
- coal and precious
- funky heavy
- charcoal, refined
- precious and other
- refined rare
- noble and baser
- excep-tionally dense
- high-purity structural
- critical and strategic
- strongest case-hardened
- earthy alkaline
- soldering other
- precious and inferior
- white, colored
- just radioactive
- important heavy
- plain, sleek
- precious and military
- inorganic heavy
- useful heavy
- perfect or noble
- simple valuable
- coal, nonferrous
- colloidal precious
- different precious
- most tenacious
- modern, stronger
- modest heavy
- ceramic and unknown
- wrenching soft
- northern precious
- inconceivably hot
- precious and toxic
- quicksilver, various
- chemically positive
- common, inexpensive
- supply precious
- purest commercial
- idle precious
- possibly precious
- precious and jewelled
- baser or inferior
- brittle or short
- coral, precious
- together ignoble
- thence precious
- uncommon and highly valuable
- valuable heavy
- alkaline earthy
- dangerous heavy
- far baser
- useful and precious
- crystal, precious
- precious and useful
- purest heavy
- inferior or imperfect
- bootleg precious
- mainly precious
- fissionable heavy
- complex heavy
- \~\~\~\~structural
- many alkaline
- heavy rare
- available refined
- unspecified rare
- precious and industrial
- refined precious
- imperishable colored
- enough assorted
- dangerous molten
- common, low-value
- high-voltage european
- delicate precious
- reflective, high-density
- liquid toxic
- molten heavy
- toxic heavy
- heavy and industrial
- useful and abundant
- common or precious
- supply ideal
- commoner or baser
- new alkaline
- heaviest, costliest
- so-called useful
- so-called alkaline
- various incandescent
- ordinary parallel
- coral and precious
- commonly molten
- commonest industrial
- same or dissimilar
- somewhat scarce
- other precious
- various pure
- common heavy
- enough precious
- various powdered
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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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