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 proverb
Below is a list of describing words for proverb. 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 proverb:
- true but rather vulgar
- excellent but obvious
- sad tahitian
- delicious japanese
- indeed obscure
- vulgar and indeed obscure
- relevant old
- last rustic
- --_oriental
- sensible turkish
- true and far-reaching
- quaint and serviceable
- double italian
- equivocal italian
- vulgar but popular
- racy turkish
- oft-repeated dutch
- rather grecian
- indeed obsolete
- formerly elusive
- familiar culinary
- common but very wise
- oft-quoted jewish
- ancient but trite
- prosaic sicilian
- eminently ornithological
- old and very precious
- coarse but descriptive
- trite spanish
- old canny
- pithy spanish
- naively vain
- dramatic temporary
- egotistic and heartless
- favorite turkish
- immoral capitalist
- slyly witty
- sad and illuminating
- shrewd popular
- old but true
- old and truthful
- old dokal
- favorite hungarian
- old sufi
- absurd vulgar
- good shrewd
- old and sensible
- canny dutch
- stinging spanish
- well-known gaelic
- ancient and harsh
- vile, malicious
- semi-metrical
- appalling spanish
- rather chinese
- true and impressive
- admirable swedish
- profound spanish
- old and very true
- well-known and oft-quoted
- peculiarly felicitous
- dokal
- odd and unfamiliar
- wise irish
- quaint spanish
- old tahitian
- miserable italian
- cynical french
- foolish and pernicious
- old lithuanian
- anonymous japanese
- purely nautical
- more unimpeachable
- well-known spanish
- excellent italian
- same hungarian
- old cautionary
- admirable and appropriate
- unpleasant and inconvenient
- corresponding italian
- unfinished french
- vulgar practical
- uncompromising old
- ancient and well-known
- trite old
- rather optimistic
- somewhat trite
- old bulgarian
- simple but striking
- such rural
- old and trite
- coarse german
- common jewish
- familiar french
- ominous old
- pithy old
- old and true
- spanish or italian
- same well-worn
- wholesome old
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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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