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 preparation
Below is a list of describing words for preparation. 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 preparation:
- proper appreciative
- deficient mathematical
- adequate psychological
- disagreeable anatomical
- thorough previous
- due and long
- somewhat dreamy or problematic
- dreamy or problematic
- objectionable alcoholic
- obsessive and totally illogical
- vigilant and ceaseless
- single anatomical
- contraceptive herbal
- slightest warlike
- suitable adhesive
- grave tonsorial
- twofold divine
- sufficient studious
- long, painstaking and laborious
- rapid but ample
- larger culinary
- attractive or artistic
- rehearsal and general
- obsessively continuous
- long disciplinary
- shallow and generous
- much tragical
- ordinary deliberate
- technical and rapid
- well-known pyrotechnical
- similar philological
- experience--racial
- artificial colloidal
- thy faulty
- roughest and most laborious
- objectionable and expensive
- old and uncertain
- expensive or laborious
- best and infallible
- reputedly palatable
- consistent, greasy
- extremely soft and pliant
- stronger and certain
- joyous and confident
- best and only suitable
- ~technical
- democratic ideological
- fiendishly apt
- patently insufficient
- poor or hasty
- complete and fitting
- stern but unrecognized
- thin and rather tepid
- sane, permanent
- horrid but undefined
- breathless, ridiculous
- complete scholastic
- past, immediate
- insufficient and careless
- necessary solemn
- cheap and savory
- special strategical
- strenuous, rapid
- convenient liquid
- long and methodical
- stupendous and unanimous
- rapid and loose
- previous digestive
- constant adequate
- long and most artful
- laborious and scientific
- non-violent educational
- tireless, painstaking
- anti-medicinal
- best-known medicinal
- powerfully remedial
- formal and almost ceremonial
- conscious and overt
- palatable yellow
- proper preservative
- diligent and effective
- pedestrian and gymnastic
- intensive and rapid
- irish culinary
- plainest and best
- durable but unattractive
- program--professional
- extensive and business-like
- worth and constant
- possible--obviously strategic
- constant studious
- portable and simple
- brilliant but most treacherous
- thoughtful physical
- careful and even laborious
- laborious, indispensable
- secret, painstaking
- scientific, chemical
- indispensable medicinal
- essential, non-alcoholic
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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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