Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 patriotism

Below is a list of describing words for patriotism. 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 patriotism:

  • mere rabid
  • foolish or boastful
  • heroic and enlightened
  • ardent, new
  • ferocious but unfortunate
  • blind fanatical
  • own public-spirited
  • often crazy and boastful
  • ardent, animated
  • almost lofty
  • deliberate and straightforward
  • profound spontaneous
  • arrogant and mock
  • reluctant and uncongenial
  • lukewarm local
  • sane and genuine
  • eventually true
  • territorial, political
  • provincial nor municipal
  • bad jewish
  • local, unjust
  • larger, theoretical
  • narrower and actual
  • ardent exclusive
  • fierce and masculine
  • boastful and rhetorical
  • rugged conscientious
  • bi-lingual and bi-racial
  • regionalism and local
  • sturdy, defiant
  • planetary and racial
  • one-sided, narrow-minded
  • impracticable local
  • sadly lukewarm
  • older sentimental
  • deep local
  • passionate and ill-fated
  • honest and selfless
  • perfectly honest and selfless
  • incorruptible thin
  • meanwhile expectant
  • unhappy self-assertive
  • unquestioned and conspicuous
  • country--national
  • magnificently disinterested
  • jealous local
  • enthusiastic, benignant
  • contagious and inspiring
  • --sentimental and political
  • sentimental and political
  • intense irish
  • prodigal fraternal
  • pious and visionary
  • bland parochial
  • fine and eager
  • narrow and fiery
  • steady undaunted
  • aggressive and constructive
  • such alcoholic
  • faithful, undying
  • fervent, unflagging
  • true and well-regulated
  • unswerving and passionate
  • obediently modern
  • jewish narrow
  • larger and imperial
  • best, territorial
  • hearty, thoughtful
  • alike uninteresting and unintelligible
  • alike uninteresting
  • common and undying
  • merely exalted
  • profound athenian
  • fervent peruvian
  • false, cheap
  • absurd lofty
  • blended fervent
  • honest, unswerving
  • virile and intelligent
  • undeniable local
  • blatant, aggressive
  • worth and disinterested
  • life--local
  • municipal life--local
  • aggressive and declamatory
  • austrian local
  • rather febrile
  • fine and ardent
  • largest and most unselfish
  • insolent, jubilant
  • perhaps unselfish
  • prominent, equal
  • fervent, romantic
  • energetic and purposeful
  • bombastic and frothy
  • particularistic, localized
  • fervent imperial
  • undying, unyielding
  • nationalistic or ethnic
  • jewish, nationalistic

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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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