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 occasion
Below is a list of describing words for occasion. 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 occasion:
- former and not dissimilar
- notable festival
- terrible and unforgettable
- merry informal
- customary and solemn
- sacred and joyous
- otherwise convivial
- solemn and most momentous
- former and most memorable
- fair but guilty
- kindred festive
- proximate and voluntary
- quiet, fragile
- festive and convivial
- somber, tragic
- joyless, brittle
- semi-royal, semi-ecclesiastical
- festive or ceremonial
- commemorative semi-centennial
- apparent extraordinary
- wholly festive
- momentous and historical
- intimate and solemn
- grandly impressive
- uncommonly simple and modest
- sad but not sinful
- next fitting
- earliest well-known
- grand and never-to-be-forgotten
- hideously memorable
- happy and well-planned
- gratifying and impressive
- sorry, solemn
- bally warm
- important and potentially dangerous
- sweet but lawful
- private or sedate
- intricate and debatable
- anxious and momentous
- solemn and acceptable
- ample and justifiable
- solemn, auspicious
- great and critically stringent
- critically stringent
- powerful and pregnant
- solemn or weighty
- special and most exceptional
- incomparable annual
- dear and excusable
- memorable and respectable
- happy and memorable
- former memorable
- present festive
- next festive
- grandest social
- suspiciously opportune
- odd, memorable
- major festive
- provincial european
- special and awesome
- next bridal
- undeniably exciting
- especially garrulous
- formal or social
- joyful and magnificent
- specially gala
- indistinct dramatic
- joyous and momentous
- ethically instructive
- memorable and ethically instructive
- memorable and sublime
- gay and enjoyable
- solemn and gay
- truly grand and pleasing
- singularly interesting and descriptive
- rather wonderful and terrible
- important or ceremonial
- fitting and favorable
- conventionally joyful
- utterly irrational and irresponsible
- real proximate
- different and subsequent
- great or cruel
- particular dismal
- trivial and inconsiderable
- jovial or innocent
- earliest fitting
- passably cheerful
- grave and martial
- probably heartless
- horribly ill-timed
- open-air and out-of-school
- sufficient and wholly reasonable
- domestic festal
- important festive
- mere ostensible
- joyful public
- special and auspicious
- ordinarily interesting and important
- thrillingly important
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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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