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 necessity
Below is a list of describing words for necessity. 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 necessity:
- positive and obvious
- sheer neurotic
- tragic, logical
- universal mortal
- urgent and extreme
- damned logical
- unconditional historic
- inescapable mathematical
- extreme and most urgent
- immoral, spiritual
- absolute and pre-eminent
- logical and commercial
- minor and exceptional
- hard, political
- peculiarly imperious
- absolute and urgent
- blind metaphysical
- wearisome dialectical
- merely grave
- metaphysical general
- urgent and indispensable
- apart strong
- extreme or grave
- fatal extreme
- fatal and cruel
- determinate external
- imperative governmental
- indeed dire
- urgent military
- primal, mere
- torella--only strong
- absolute and indispensable
- unpleasant and toilsome
- absolute and imperious
- absolute nor metaphysical
- dire military
- prime structural
- urgent and imperious
- grave or very grave
- philosophical and absolute
- most dire
- severe but indispensable
- cunning physical
- practical unconditional
- absolute stringent
- general and imperative
- peremptory, more
- single, difficult
- immense and urgent
- imperative and disagreeable
- gallingly fatal
- satisfactory subjective
- regrettable but inexorable
- alleged economic
- metrical and linguistic
- soulless natural
- fatal inevitable
- merest natural
- pathetically severe
- logical or ethical
- necessary, logical
- logical or mechanical
- extreme or unforeseen
- prime and absolute
- mournful and momentary
- sentimental, soft-hearted
- physical and fundamental
- irresponsible and infinite
- automatic and magical
- stern logical
- hypothetical, conditional
- conditional physical
- primal ideal
- unconditional moral
- deplorable strategic
- dead and inflexible
- imperative and overpowering
- inexorable materialistic
- evident and imminent
- prime national
- certain eternal
- fatal and unavoidable
- absolute or mathematical
- psychal
- pragmatic economic
- intellectual but emotional
- social or environmental
- cqually urgent
- real evident
- purely impersonal and scientific
- political and even moral
- unavoidable political
- stringent internal
- unforseen but imperative
- fatal public
- high inscrutable
- real idealistic
- imminent and palpable
- feigned and false
- obscure inner
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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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