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 philanthropy
Below is a list of describing words for philanthropy. 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 philanthropy:
- constructive and preventive
- self-denial and charming
- correct and genuine
- sentimental and universal
- false and fanatical
- british vicarious
- wide and cosmopolitan
- blind, impatient
- remarkably efficient and intelligent
- private and often misguided
- abstract and delicate
- noble and lifelong
- impassioned, indignant
- bustling practical
- ardent local
- maudlin, mock
- windy, mischievous
- godless and perfectly secular
- spurious but highly popular
- hopeful and rational
- bogus and merely verbal
- cheerful and rather bustling
- downright pure
- general jovial
- unbridled miscellaneous
- real and unselfish
- abstract journalistic
- noble but ideal
- cruel and misguided
- deep and sublime
- wretched and hypocritical
- hypocritical, boundless
- plain, unpicturesque
- generous and unobtrusive
- curious, modern
- far-sighted and generous
- intelligent and constructive
- perfectly secular
- especially universal
- affectionate and liberal
- remedial or preventive
- pure, humble
- rather bustling
- aggressive missionary
- often misguided
- active and unceasing
- eager and sanguine
- active and indefatigable
- practical, constructive
- noble individual
- poor, noble
- lame and blind
- warm and pure
- little reasonable
- common weal
- active and generous
- less unselfish
- real and unaffected
- genuine, hearty
- efficient and intelligent
- fine religious
- modern practical
- well-meaning but misguided
- general practical
- =national
- reckless and improvident
- much current
- comprehensive and systematic
- remarkably efficient
- strong democratic
- such unselfish
- purely disinterested
- noble and exalted
- certain theoretical
- noblest and purest
- pure and disinterested
- such ineffable
- palliative
- much genuine
- much general
- self-denial
- mawkish
- vague general
- wise and generous
- generous and liberal
- little scientific
- merely verbal
- such unparalleled
- preventive
- prefrontal
- pure and lofty
- more ridiculous
- disinterested
- usual calm
- highly popular
- world-wide
- public or private
- universal
- telescopic
- weal
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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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