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 nomenclature
Below is a list of describing words for nomenclature. 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 nomenclature:
- weird, pestilential
- popular chromatic
- admirable binary
- celtic mythological
- days--chemical
- lurid and diabolical
- fearless western
- british topographical
- permanent biologic
- seemingly encyclopedic
- chemi&al
- careless parental
- orismological
- every-day veterinary
- expressive local
- simple but precise
- unfair and satirical
- somewhat unfair and satirical
- peculiar numeral
- primitive numeral
- simplest and most descriptive
- melodious scientific
- common, untried
- possible trinomial
- new and inaccurate
- absurd and thoroughly jeffersonian
- heretofore current
- sonorous geographical
- precise zoological
- truthfully popular
- modern stellar
- picturesquely appropriate
- definite generic
- portentous metaphorical
- distinctive dual
- subsequent traditional
- adequate and definite
- mysterious and fabled
- rude and fiery
- plausible and indefinite
- literary or figurative
- complete celtic
- earlier erroneous
- present philological
- hydro-geographical
- present topographical
- new biochemical
- nifty long-range
- overall mechanical
- poor and prosaic
- loose and scanty
- non-decimal
- hyphenated british
- multiply domestic
- prevalent careless
- entire numeral
- alarming scientific
- simple and easily intelligible
- danish local
- thoroughly jeffersonian
- somato-ætiological
- somato-�tiological
- somato-aetiological
- uncouth modern
- old chronological
- complete triple
- accidental and arbitrary
- whole sonorous
- variable and indefinite
- rather professional
- original distinctive
- absurdly inappropriate
- apt and descriptive
- wide poetical
- usual obscure
- different, such
- british geographical
- clumsy and irregular
- definite and adequate
- already lengthy
- wearisome and interminable
- own astronomical
- more high-sounding
- storinal
- cognominal
- contemporary naval
- somewhat poetic
- binomial
- trinomial
- whole geographical
- ancient chemical
- wholly appropriate
- binominal
- commonplace and vulgar
- reasonably simple
- usual haphazard
- strange scientific
- somewhat unfair
- psychical and physiological
- present municipal
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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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