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 parallels
Below is a list of describing words for parallels. 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 parallels:
- generally fanciful and fallacious
- generally fanciful
- many antithetical
- simian or canine
- thirtieth and thirty-eighth
- thirty-fourth and thirty-sixth
- imaginary and false
- so-called symbolic
- vibrant but now vacant
- striking phonetic
- tepid historic
- startling and exact
- closest seeming
- unmoral geometrical
- interesting but inconclusive
- sixth and thirty-sixth
- few and remote
- supply pictorial
- apt historical
- vigorous but repellent
- tartar african
- few evolutionary
- far-reaching mythological
- classic or pagan
- imperfect historical
- exact biblical
- therefore modern
- eerie avian
- significant inspirational
- literary structural
- thematic or visual
- mythic or spiritual
- slight and few
- trenchant historical
- longer horizontal
- respective magnetic
- further classical
- striking cultural
- other and closer
- fifteenth and twenty-fifth
- verbal and other
- certain surprising
- several uncanny
- thematic and structural
- eighth and fifteenth
- supply odd
- several buddhist
- curious medieval
- other babylonian
- alien racial
- many celtic
- fifteenth and twenty-first
- thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth
- sundry european
- linguistic and other
- legitimate intellectual
- striking modern
- such repetitive
- well-known classical
- numerous irish
- further striking
- present striking
- above-noted
- vague and fanciful
- curious oriental
- many convenient
- significant modern
- modern rural
- few exact
- more celtic
- short oblique
- present curious
- supply full
- nearest modern
- other shakespearian
- certain preparatory
- many instructive
- present remarkable
- present but few
- rough and primitive
- various cultural
- sufficiently satisfactory
- curiously exact
- many geographical
- present interesting
- few historic
- numerous european
- unique historical
- certain obvious
- many striking
- fair western
- thirty-fourth
- thirty-sixth
- many biblical
- thirty-eighth
- theological and religious
- curious medi�val
- present few
- many suggestive
- many and painful
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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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