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 rainfall
Below is a list of describing words for rainfall. 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 rainfall:
- cloudy, scant
- locally heavy
- heavy year-round
- recent appalling
- unending cool
- heaviest annual
- reliable moderate
- gray and steady
- particular direct
- adequate but not excessive
- exceptionally deficient
- periodic torrential
- fortunately heavy
- annual and average
- mean-annual
- therefore small or nil
- therefore small
- little year-round
- irregular and inefficient
- sudden copious
- sudden, capricious
- average annual
- amazingly corrosive
- extremely small and tibetan
- occasional, slight
- normal or excessive
- slow and sodden
- excessive and continuous
- excessive or deficient
- generally equal
- customary heavy
- usually plentiful
- average or above-average
- precious limited
- high and certain
- abundant and regular
- excellent annual
- ceaseless, monotonous
- short violent
- sometimes inadequate
- limited and intermittent
- moderate but sufficient
- slow, penetrating
- rather abundant
- scanty and uncertain
- year-round
- variable local
- abnormally heavy
- tolerably copious
- largest annual
- large and favorable
- heavy annual
- equal annual
- excessive local
- _normal
- unduly high
- low annual
- smaller annual
- exceedingly scanty
- occasional actual
- unduly heavy
- less continual
- quite trifling
- extremely uncertain
- fairly abundant
- uncommonly heavy
- substantial annual
- heavy autumnal
- irregular and uncertain
- minimum annual
- dreary, endless
- less scanty
- constant, steady
- more scanty
- annual
- moderately high
- abnormally low
- above-normal
- less copious
- somewhat regular
- heavy and constant
- extremely small
- heavy and continuous
- small and irregular
- annual average
- unusually heavy
- constant cold
- torrential
- usually less
- scant
- total annual
- deficient
- comparatively heavy
- fairly high
- less abundant
- present small
- maximum and minimum
- barely adequate
- abundant
- local and general
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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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