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 relic
Below is a list of describing words for relic. 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 relic:
- broken-down, wrinkled
- priceless ethnological
- venerable but dilapidated
- decayed but still handsome
- ancient bony
- eternal and dreadful
- extraordinary and invaluable
- last peerless
- pitiable and perfectly useless
- strangest and most perfect
- solitary defensive
- good-natured, witty
- ancient, sentient
- venerable but useless
- venerable and precious
- true and absolutely authentic
- sinister and dead
- primordial egyptian
- holiest true
- almost cartoonlike
- dusty entomological
- respectable, revolutionary
- finest structural
- precious or beautiful
- clumsy, troublesome
- sole but necessary
- indubitable oriental
- curious and apparently valuable
- meekest old
- last burdensome
- memorial and sacred
- oppressive and widespread
- wrong-headed but chivalrous
- choicest antiquarian
- outworn but beautiful
- quaint rude
- commonplace and thoroughly uninteresting
- entirely worn-out
- interesting but entirely worn-out
- ponderous and murky
- worthless and superstitious
- largest homogeneous
- solitary and powerless
- sole and sad
- trifling but interesting
- great and mystical
- sleepy, helpless
- wonderful fossil
- serious-minded old
- hopelessly old-fashioned
- wonderful jewish
- comfortable, padded
- weird historic
- occasional valuable
- venerable and historic
- old waterlogged
- quaint, premature
- dog-eared historical
- savage and unworthy
- rusted victorian
- crumpled ancient
- awesomely functional
- last unchanging
- priceless archeological
- misshapen jacobean
- inert alien
- precious and sanctified
- doubtfully genuine
- histerical
- diminutive, shrunken
- surpassingly strange
- exceedingly curious and interesting
- singular pyramidical
- strange architectural
- last disreputable
- precious peruvian
- valuable grammatical
- sorely dilapidated
- genuine old-world
- irresponsible and unscientific
- pious maternal
- unique elizabethan
- poor terrible
- singularly interesting and curious
- oldest antiquarian
- mysterious undated
- unknown druidical
- real, authentic
- secret and precious
- weak and hopeless
- rude misshapen
- curious philological
- last shrunken
- cultured old
- useless and false
- apparently valuable
- thoroughly uninteresting
- pre-eminently sacred
- national sacred
- otherwise superb
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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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