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 penances
Below is a list of describing words for penances. 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 penances:
- extraordinarily atrocious
- practised austere
- severe and self-inflicted
- practised hard
- least, solitary
- endless meaningless
- severe and excruciating
- self-prescribed and self-inflicted
- suitable and not disgraceful
- severe and grievous
- brutal self-imposed
- ancient inquisitional
- appalling voluntary
- specially disgusting
- severe and very rigid
- public and congregational
- severe and indestructible
- self-inflicted and ludicrous
- practised eternal
- heavy and unfair
- practised frightful
- extremely heavy and unfair
- canonical public
- severe and voluntary
- lengthy and often painful
- sincere, social
- private canonical
- self-denial, uninterrupted
- bitterest, humiliating
- solemn and self-inflicted
- considerable self-inflicted
- painful and instructive
- various humiliating
- thine austere
- practised extraordinary
- hypocritical religious
- strange and unnecessary
- good, necessary
- highly austere
- low-fat, high-protein
- petty humiliating
- inventive and humiliating
- cruel and unheard-of
- little self-prescribed
- different canonical
- terrible self-inflicted
- brief and spurious
- slight secret
- own and purely gratuitous
- heroic and unceasing
- severe revolutionary
- severest self-imposed
- gravely obligatory
- public canonical
- public humiliating
- real perpetual
- practised severe
- ordinary canonical
- unnatural and horrible
- former rigorous
- exacting severe
- other self-inflicted
- little heartfelt
- slight ecclesiastical
- public ecclesiastical
- severe ecclesiastical
- damned, dreary
- awful and weird
- brutal, power-hungry
- horribly tedious
- less disgraceful
- grave and long
- horrible and unheard-of
- public and humiliating
- intense and fervent
- severe public
- ancient canonical
- self-prescribed
- humiliating and degrading
- now interior
- own worse
- truly worthwhile
- perhaps hard
- self-inflicted
- supposedly private
- long and grievous
- cruel and humiliating
- rigid and severe
- frequent painful
- great harsh
- least pecuniary
- frightfully long
- certain salutary
- necessary preparatory
- involuntary and voluntary
- formal ecclesiastical
- worse possible
- fairly harsh
- usual mental
- ridiculous and absurd
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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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