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 north
Below is a list of describing words for north. 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 north:
- colder, duller
- straight galactic
- solid and hitherto irresistible
- bleak and gusty
- guttural, loud
- uniformed midtown
- portugal, portuguese
- vast and icy
- non-commercial, non-industrial
- free, mighty
- ignorant silver-haired
- half-hearted and panic-stricken
- brown, loyal
- virtuous and bibulous
- serious and hard-working
- icy and inhospitable
- distinct and extremely peculiar
- seductive, disappointing
- unreasoning, passionate
- typical, western
- bourgeois and commercial
- entirely bourgeois and commercial
- entire populous
- red three-masted
- ungrateful and venal
- hot water--aliwal
- sober, opulent
- magnetic and true
- self-governing free
- bleak and unfertile
- comparatively bleak and unfertile
- bitter and indomitable
- fresh robust
- true, northern
- least least
- mysterious and hitherto inaccessible
- foul insidious
- cold, ceremonial
- republican, democratic
- ready further
- equally honest and patriotic
- cold and envious
- rude, bleak
- truly free and democratic
- beautiful but lofty
- shallow irritable
- gloomy romantic
- merry and rambunctious
- --central and western
- good due
- long-range high-frequency
- impassive, impassable
- typical conscientious
- increasingly militant and belligerent
- militant and belligerent
- rich melodic
- rural chic
- pale berber
- triumphant communist
- monstrous, terrible
- east extreme
- perturbed and indignant
- soft and leafy
- lower british
- benign and harmless
- temperate, humid
- fayal and british
- bright and early old
- free inventive
- geographical or true
- raw and frosty
- brutish and degraded
- fiercest farthest
- arctic or temperate
- temperate western
- distant, desolate
- still white and hard
- free loyal
- white, interminable
- montreal and british
- major frank
- small gregarious
- extreme sad
- general trial
- unsuitable native
- gray and formidable
- tall and sentimental
- temperate and arctic
- biggest and fastest
- real, beautiful
- cold and rugged
- next, dear
- entirely bourgeois
- gray primeval
- grim and icy
- enraged and vindictive
- --tropical and temperate
- formidable and well-known
- sublime and heroic
- pale grim
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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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