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 rules
Below is a list of describing words for rules. 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 rules:
- authoritarian presidential
- amtal
- arithmetic--fundamental
- democratic civilian
- special departmental
- previously sacred
- departmental major
- unwritten but very important
- single-party and military
- arbitrary and irritating
- authoritarian socialist
- ill-defined and contradictory
- fundamental magical
- down stringent
- severe and fierce
- rational, disinterested
- otherwise invariable
- somewhat arbitrary and stringent
- undisturbed spanish
- cold definite
- never barest
- single-party
- brutal soviet
- iundamental
- ancient, urbane
- sacred and indisputable
- murderous, capricious
- basic unwritten
- fantastic monastic
- benign and perpetual
- correct and commendable
- general or stationary
- exquisitely convoluted
- long and uncontested
- lifeless and unthinking
- intermittent and capricious
- few and absolute
- xenophobic communist
- certain unbreakable
- sole immutable
- osteo-grammatical
- paternal and absolute
- mortally tedious
- inflexible and mortally tedious
- younger, dry
- special and fantastic
- necessary municipal
- direct swedish
- appropriately restrictive
- mundane and celestial
- old, emergent
- undistinguished military
- complex druidical
- strict one-man
- complex, draconian
- alone infallible
- harsh, universal
- rigorous and unalterable
- down precise
- perfect, independent
- general and even mechanical
- suave feminine
- strict and frivolous
- morally lawless
- short and tolerable
- passive-loss
- strict, senseless
- meticulous sexual
- exact and superstitious
- strictest phonetic
- stringent and salutary
- antiquated and outworn
- present wise
- one-party
- conclusive and final
- elementary grammatical
- stodgy, tyrannical
- more-or-less unbreakable
- entire and inviolate
- sometimes unacknowledged
- cruel or poor
- unwritten and sometimes unacknowledged
- chaotic selfish
- sure federal
- orthodox and strictest
- inflexible and semi-conventual
- definite impersonal
- new, perplexing
- fierce and bloodstained
- excellent dietary
- strict frosty
- other and stricter
- stiff and often inapplicable
- coops--general
- wise and well-known
- technical and arbitrary
- correct phonetic
- finally seventy-two
- irrationally hard and strict
- better single
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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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