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 puritans
Below is a list of describing words for puritans. 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 puritans:
- palpable professional
- stern, aggressive
- doctrinal and experimental
- intolerant and disloyal
- rigid, narrow-minded
- raw, sentimental
- grim and wrathful
- famous and sturdy
- penniless itinerant
- tolerant and untheological
- moody and sombre
- zeal, dangerous
- strict and somewhat militant
- tough indomitable
- hard self-righteous
- pious, precise
- clear-cut personal
- extreme elizabethan
- valiant, stalwart
- intolerant and often fanatical
- callous and morose
- stern and exasperated
- strong-willed, religious
- rigid and impassive
- long biblical
- sour and ignorant
- conscientious zealous
- thrifty and poor
- demure sweet
- avowed and utter
- honest, severe
- complacent, irritable
- ungovernable old
- dear, merciful
- noisy and bigoted
- active and lifelong
- shrewd but unsatisfied
- sour but apparently honest
- strict but genial
- rigid modern
- restless and somewhat fatuous
- steadfast and upright old
- demure, grave
- staid and solid
- whole inane
- savage anglo-irish
- thin lean
- lewd and dreadful
- quaint, staid
- fiery and unyielding
- hypocritical, canting
- other uncompromising
- solemn pragmatic
- stern and sour
- british and pure
- furious and bigoted
- wealthy, well-educated
- intolerant old
- resolute and effective
- own unflinching
- selfish, hard
- devout, intelligent
- real, respectable
- stern rigid
- dour and stubborn
- clear-eyed little
- exclusive old
- greedy and shameless
- thrifty, old
- often fanatical
- grave and fearless
- grave and strict
- pious and painful
- other copious
- canting hypocritical
- respectable, middle-class
- moral and pious
- sturdy and prosperous
- old apocryphal
- strait-laced old
- serious and rational
- uncompromising little
- black icy
- staid and solemn
- rigid and narrow
- old typical
- old, stern
- pedantic old
- few extraordinary
- delicate, proud
- grave and cautious
- strict, stern
- once triumphant
- old fanatical
- other happier
- more unblemished
- grave and severe
- strict old
- grim and ferocious
- few resolute
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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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