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 occasions
Below is a list of describing words for occasions. 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 occasions:
- former and not dissimilar
- accidental or trifling
- notable festival
- social or pseudo-social
- solemn and festive
- terrible and unforgettable
- merry informal
- customary and solemn
- sacred and joyous
- otherwise convivial
- solemn and most momentous
- various emergent
- former and most memorable
- high, festal
- fair but guilty
- invariably joyous
- kindred festive
- mortally practical
- proximate and voluntary
- generally unlawful
- quiet, fragile
- rare festal
- festive and convivial
- sa^eral
- somber, tragic
- notably uninformative
- joyless, brittle
- surreal and notably uninformative
- semi-royal, semi-ecclesiastical
- well-bred homicidal
- festive or ceremonial
- commemorative semi-centennial
- pseudo-social
- countless subsequent
- apparent extraordinary
- macabre social
- wholly festive
- rare, empty
- momentous and historical
- noc\-turnal
- intimate and solemn
- rare sad
- grandly impressive
- high important
- uncommonly simple and modest
- patriotic and special
- sad but not sinful
- trifling and simple
- next fitting
- slight or sudden
- earliest well-known
- bustling and enterprising
- grand and never-to-be-forgotten
- dry and non-state
- least fermentation
- rare, formal
- desperately rare
- wonderful and dreadful
- solemn or festive
- hideously memorable
- highly ceremonial
- happy and well-planned
- solemn and highly ceremonial
- gratifying and impressive
- thankfully rarer
- sorry, solemn
- rare and utterly safe
- bally warm
- grimly formal
- important and potentially dangerous
- socially lofty
- sweet but lawful
- ceremonial private
- private or sedate
- rare ceremonial
- intricate and debatable
- various festive
- anxious and momentous
- ceremonial or official
- solemn and acceptable
- relatively inconsequential
- ample and justifiable
- solemn, world-wide
- solemn, auspicious
- gala and festal
- great and critically stringent
- present and accidental
- critically stringent
- rare but delightful
- powerful and pregnant
- tribal or emotional
- solemn or weighty
- practical or polemical
- special and most exceptional
- temporary festive
- incomparable annual
- ceremonial or semiceremonial
- dear and excusable
- different but rare
- memorable and respectable
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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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