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 service
Below is a list of describing words for service. 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 service:
- voluntary military
- compulsory military
- good intercity
- fair, international
- top-heavy civil
- episcopal burial
- inadequate domestic
- paramilitary general
- additional international
- digital international
- local and intercity
- outmoded, poor
- modest and willing
- interstellar medical
- obligatory military
- bloated civil
- voluntary and difficult
- downright eager
- female voluntary
- involuntary military
- jubal perfect
- mere one-year
- always current and personal
- proper memorial
- domestic cellular
- perilous and vital
- contraband, unneutral
- lucrative and useful
- joint consular
- vital financial
- unneutral
- corporate marshal
- daring and admirable
- splendid surreptitious
- separate consular
- generally erratic
- excellent international
- dependable, discreet
- technical consultative
- institutional protective
- good acceptable
- valuable and very honorable
- female military
- laudable personal
- rude burial
- late and principal
- universal military
- bloated public
- dutch diplomatic
- loyal and forlorn
- individual terminal
- recent outstanding
- compulsory universal
- norwegian consular
- perpetual funeral
- sovereign, immense
- disinterested, public
- solemn burial
- beautiful burial
- always current
- public or confidential
- inconvenient postal
- terrible and faithful
- unbroken, pure
- humble but single-minded
- unhappy and thankless
- thine unintended
- hardest and most unrelenting
- more secretarial
- mighty senior
- tasteful memorial
- talented junior
- indian civil
- much and hard
- impressive memorial
- brief burial
- -general, active
- irish consular
- overstaffed public
- annual and perpetual
- delightful and effeminate
- military obligatory
- thereto obligatory
- faithful and meritorious
- permanent civil
- bengal medical
- public divine
- fair rural
- inglorious and often painful
- funeral, memorial
- short memorial
- pitiless, cruel
- solemn and domestic
- painful and various
- not-quite-essential
- disposal plus funeral
- stark uncomfortable
- evil spectral
- philippine civil
- contraband and unneutral
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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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