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 printers
Below is a list of describing words for printers. 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 printers:
- young calico
- ink-jet
- early worcestershire
- poor and youthful
- lithographic and general
- successful calico
- indeed foreign
- uncouth, half-educated
- prolific and miscellaneous
- zealous or avaricious
- obsolete, young
- efficient missionary
- large photomechanical
- terribly legible
- oldest continental
- well-known jacobinical
- early lithographic
- wealthy calico
- merry and receptive
- blindly enterprising
- standard private-line
- careless, faulty
- so-called infidel
- perhaps facetious
- technically skilled
- simple centric
- quiet thermal
- oversized and slightly antiquated
- present affordable
- snazzy, state-of-the-art
- retail, lithographic
- regular and competent
- coy, limited
- enlightened, intelligent
- generous and influential
- largest athletic
- noisy mechanical
- old, gruff
- outwardly commonplace
- legal and general
- modern successful
- proper photographic
- many lithographic
- desperately outmoded
- blue, red and green
- little and old
- unfortunate local
- enterprising german
- few obvious
- absolutely bogus
- ingenious and witty
- original optical
- swiss or german
- domestic old
- typographical and other
- several humane
- well-known belgian
- photomechanical
- widely travelled
- characteristic old
- perfectly evident
- straightforward old
- spirited and successful
- intelligent and courteous
- tiny portable
- eminent and successful
- medieval european
- calico
- disorderly
- private-line
- other swiss
- late well-known
- correct several
- enterprising and industrious
- lithographic
- specially privileged
- old practical
- slightly antiquated
- jovial young
- such adorable
- german or italian
- chief native
- poor, foolish
- greatest french
- other dutch
- own earliest
- obvious
- early italian
- more cheap
- tremendously high
- elizabethan and jacobean
- former commercial
- many continental
- other former
- ignorant old
- mysterious young
- present excellent
- different young
- prosperous young
- vain little
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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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