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 participation
Below is a list of describing words for participation. 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 participation:
- social nor sociable
- imply contributory
- maximally active
- surely significant
- greater foreign
- genuine biracial
- major big-time
- illusory and metaphysical
- helpful and heartfelt
- external and moral
- merely external and moral
- rapid and serious
- immediate and perhaps vital
- full existential
- always lackadaisical
- active, intentional
- occasional and formal
- active erotic
- prolific psychic
- continual, easy and direct
- minimum black
- eager and moderately frequent
- equal joint
- active canadian
- salutary and active
- striking relative
- shallow and circumscribed
- voluntary and unrestricted
- life-long and active
- general civilised
- ritual, much or little
- whole creditable
- equal and active
- public direct
- due and appropriate
- fair local
- possible willing
- apparent willing
- vast sympathetic
- brief but not unheroic
- therewith public
- maximum meaningful
- own lighthearted
- total sensual
- active and salutary
- active and official
- direct collective
- willing and interested
- effective and decisive
- brief but fruitful
- own and full
- moderately frequent
- persistently active
- real, uninterrupted
- wholesome and effective
- active managerial
- hearty and liberal
- sufficiently public
- constant interested
- frequent and worthy
- modern worldwide
- frustrating british
- direct and authoritative
- perhaps vital
- practically compulsory
- confident happy
- actually common
- practical parliamentary
- similar tribal
- instantaneous imaginative
- simple, ready
- active and personal
- canadian financial
- gay and natural
- momentary intellectual
- greater black
- remote personal
- full and direct
- thorough and enthusiastic
- momentarily active
- full and effective
- large-scale public
- active eager
- daily intellectual
- continually fuller
- natural paternal
- intelligent and conscious
- essential material
- worthy or unworthy
- past active
- swift and exhilarating
- direct, active
- instinctive and impulsive
- also equal
- increasingly open
- personal active
- merely distant
- perhaps actual
- general and continuous
- human but divine
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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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