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 publication
Below is a list of describing words for publication. 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 publication:
- genewal
- anoriginal
- secret and incendiary
- monthly national
- monthly electronic
- important and pretentious
- innocent and constitutional
- entirely electronic
- malicious defamatory
- metropolitan periodical
- intermittent, hebdomadal
- exclusive popular
- secret in-house
- respectable periodical
- witty but rather local
- plain and plentiful
- immature dogmatic
- huge but beautiful
- unsuspected separate
- extensive vellum
- funky, new
- general electronic
- especially first-time
- also canadian
- recent separate
- conservative electrical
- third-class and flashy
- beautiful antiquarian
- free, promotional
- present periodical
- infamous pictorial
- remunerative single
- complete and periodical
- vast and conscientious
- official eugenic
- major statistical
- comprehensive anti-slavery
- exact and sumptuous
- monthly religious and ethical
- false and insulting
- brightest and most amusing
- amusing but eccentric
- seditious or clandestine
- solid bibliographical
- magnificent and truly valuable
- truly solid and valuable
- noble and highly useful
- indiscreet and illiberal
- medical and critical
- quarterly medical and critical
- simultaneous initial
- emphatically non-professional
- older and emphatically non-professional
- rabid spanish
- ill-timed and injurious
- opportune and patriotic
- rabidly anti-catholic
- immature, dogmatic
- little-known local
- infamously servile
- clever periodical
- entire scandalous
- radically partisan
- abominable heretical
- journal, original
- earliest and most noteworthy
- widest and most needless
- recent and deservedly popular
- german & french
- distinctly libelous
- humorous and distinctly libelous
- intensely wicked and revolutionary
- initial separate
- unlicensed, unregistered
- next separate
- wholly scandalous
- triannual
- worldwide on-line
- literary periodical
- latest poetical
- interesting periodical
- valuable and successful
- exceedingly unequal
- odd special
- aggressive, important
- increasingly undependable
- glossy, upscale
- big-league national
- excellent and highly absorbent
- generally well-meaning
- essentially haphazard
- regional new
- [original german
- rather cautious and quiet
- late scurrilous
- filthy and obscene
- descriptive french
- adequate governmental
- anonymous original
- altogether illuminating
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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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