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 restrictions
Below is a list of describing words for restrictions. 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 restrictions:
- outdated legal
- rigorous and unexpected
- vexatious or unnecessary
- many humanistic
- idiotic parental
- petty, formal
- present unrealistic
- cramped and cloying
- irksome and burdensome
- narrow and sophisticated
- oppressive civil
- timid, self-imposed
- usual dietary
- lunar medical
- probably federal
- legal and arbitrary
- physical or financial
- injurious and vexatious
- irritating but inevitable
- unnecessary conventional
- least reciprocal
- harsh and superfluous
- corresponding taboo
- conventional or official
- necessary and humiliating
- irksome customary
- exceptional and conventional
- exogamous sexual
- numerous oppressive
- annual quantitative
- absurd commercial
- many and rigorous
- least corresponding
- essentially toothless
- physical and dietary
- unjust and inconvenient
- strange dietary
- narrow, unjust and inconvenient
- special court-martial
- specially awkward
- unreasonable parental
- arbitrary and highly inconvenient
- unjust commercial
- irrational and intolerable
- imaginary middle-aged
- unnecessary and most offensive
- possible unwarranted
- indefinite and mild
- unchristian and unreasonable
- treacherous and scandalous
- petty but annoying
- captains-general, odious
- pernicious commercial
- needlessly irksome
- troublesome and fanciful
- new cruel
- harsher legal
- artificial, self-imposed
- petrified rabbinical
- irksome and useless
- unequal or unnecessary
- civil, social and legal
- certain burdensome
- unequally restrictive
- reasonable but absolute
- unreasonable and tyrannical
- rather monastic
- extreme and even absurd
- ridiculous and greedy
- grievous commercial
- --additional and special
- fatal, prurient
- unnecessary artificial
- romanism--tyrannical
- onerous and unnecessary
- stupid fiscal
- bothersome and selfish
- meaningless and foolish
- enforceable legal
- adverse and even prohibitive
- petty and formal
- burdensome legal
- such dietary
- merely ceremonial and superstitious
- senseless and vexatious
- unnecessary, foolish
- perhaps unnecessary and useless
- wisest general
- mutual ethical
- recent unjust
- ever fresh and fresh
- extravagant, impracticable
- useless but vexatious
- occasional and ruinous
- hard and intolerable
- tiresome and petty
- often tiresome and petty
- belated and childish
- functional and social
- severe temporary
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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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