Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 school

Below is a list of describing words for school. 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 school:

  • papal medical
  • philippine normal
  • famous preparatory
  • photographic, commonplace
  • consolidated high
  • normally suave and articulate
  • intensely rival
  • small preparatory
  • public high
  • female normal
  • episcopal theological
  • public elementary
  • tough prep
  • agricultural high
  • cheap preparatory
  • cathedral classical
  • popular high
  • upcoming high
  • centralized rural
  • laval normal
  • regional high
  • white private
  • exclusive prep
  • same prep
  • coeducational high
  • rural high
  • imitative gothic
  • post-graduate medical
  • high-class preparatory
  • spirited and very modern
  • atheistic and infidel
  • provincial normal
  • old legato
  • excellent provincial
  • high and high
  • suave and articulate
  • municipal technical
  • technical high
  • little vocational
  • same parochial
  • iatrophysical
  • mystic oral
  • true or fine
  • oral and mystic
  • healthy, public
  • one-room rural
  • consolidated rural
  • four-year high
  • local comprehensive
  • private prep
  • fancy prep
  • nasty military
  • classic buddhist
  • entire elementary
  • naval postgraduate
  • mellow elementary
  • stern and radical
  • equally unforgiving
  • suggestive normal
  • agricultural, industrial and normal
  • renowned and excellent
  • local high
  • senior high
  • rural elementary
  • excellent preparatory
  • german parochial
  • junior high
  • normally suave
  • good prep
  • colored public
  • hospital medical
  • normal and industrial
  • suburban private
  • superior high
  • small-town high
  • self-supporting public
  • white-haired, hearty
  • late elementary
  • local prep
  • private and preparatory
  • new viennese
  • progressive elementary
  • public or large
  • mexican medical
  • nearby normal
  • ill-conceived high
  • friendly high
  • intelligent but intensely emotional
  • rational infant
  • philosophical realistic
  • instructional anti-submarine
  • internal satanic
  • whole satanic
  • final mathematical
  • pre-eminently realistic
  • philippine medical
  • good preparatory
  • philippine nautical
  • prominent preparatory
  • single etymological

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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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