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 pastime
Below is a list of describing words for pastime. 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 pastime:
- wickedly pleasurable
- gratifying and harmless
- fashionable and alluring
- delightful but dangerous
- various and merry
- certainly chivalrous
- favorite philosophical
- universal and wholesome
- pleasant but cruel
- mindless and often boring
- consummately nerdy
- healthy and amusing
- exciting and inspiring
- reasonable or enjoyable
- usually favorite
- vain intellectual
- dead boyish
- pleasing but singularly useless
- overpoweringly exciting
- simple ducal
- good and fascinating
- enjoyable and fascinating
- common boyish
- especially advisable
- commonplace, comfortable
- idle, filthy
- pleasant but unimportant
- past foolish
- exciting but hazardous
- less homicidal
- rude and dirty
- short-lived and amusing
- mere blithe
- innocent, social
- pleasant but useless
- pleasant preliminary
- quaint but inexpensive
- merry and ancient
- nasty, idle
- whole eccentric
- instructive and somewhat alarming
- tacitly conventional
- serious but pleasurable
- british outdoor
- equally unusual and delightful
- innocent noisy
- easy and meditative
- sufficiently thrilling
- spicy and highly unconventional
- frequent, quiet
- new and thrillingly agreeable
- perennial juvenile
- vastly exhilarating
- welcome, serene
- favorite after-dinner
- frustrating, depressing
- unimportant or merely curious
- often boring
- marginally worthy
- ostentatiously sexual
- temptingly easy and interesting
- wrong effeminate
- funny, exquisite
- useless and deleterious
- charmingly ordinary
- suitably safe
- intolerably insipid
- coarse, hilarious
- sufficiently rewarding
- popular, glamorous
- favorite archaeological
- repulsive and irresponsible
- popular turkish
- milder outdoor
- unusual medi�val
- unusual mediaeval
- loathsome and degrading
- pleasant and salutary
- particularly barbarous
- childish, useless
- social and pleasant
- particularly boyish
- exclusively australian
- thrillingly agreeable
- agreeable and universal
- agreeable, informal
- interesting and pleasurable
- daily fair-weather
- amusing and very instructive
- little incoherent
- pleasant and exhilarating
- equally intellectual
- popular martial
- customary chinese
- time-honored human
- wild exhilarating
- useless and childish
- idle ridiculous
- innocent and agreeable
- frivolous human
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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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