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 sprawling
Below is a list of describing words for sprawling. 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 sprawling:
- haphazard, lunatic
- lazy postprandial
- improper silent
- unchecked urban
- runaway urban
- convenient geographic
- comfortable drunken
- busy, ever-growing
- tacky runaway
- pernicious urban
- sensuous, intellectual
- hardcore urban
- vast urban
- human suburban
- long, urban
- suitably sultry
- unbroken urban
- anonymous urban
- smoky metropolitan
- vastly urban
- shameless communal
- sudden consequent
- haphazard urban
- suddenly boring
- low suburban
- complex and anonymous
- sexy, lazy
- hot, vulgar
- smallish urban
- huge and untidy
- blue, limp
- extravagant, misty
- arrogantly male
- dim urban
- grotesque urban
- immense bedraggled
- sloppy, masculine
- tremendous urban
- pink coastal
- substantial urban
- urban and even suburban
- unorganized and unfamiliar
- uneven urban
- symmetrical
- unconscious and uncaring
- huge chaotic
- seemingly stationary
- sudden inglorious
- occasional slender
- gray urban
- nondescript industrial
- standard urban
- much urban
- vast woodland
- high-speed urban
- ancient and monstrous
- energetic, violent
- gargantuan concrete
- mad unnatural
- distant suburban
- seedy suburban
- large, messy
- usual suburban
- ugly industrial
- populous metropolitan
- fairly menacing
- quiet, suburban
- tangled thorny
- vast coloured
- busy suburban
- usual comfortable
- tiny suburban
- long lacy
- whole urban
- total urban
- untidy grey
- unformed girlish
- apparently unbounded
- typical urban
- wide geographical
- usual urban
- big busy
- entire southern
- huge, white
- gritty urban
- massive, hulking
- dense urban
- urban
- gray industrial
- same greedy
- postprandial
- more industrial
- dark, distant
- great hideous
- down full
- seemingly infinite
- almost dizzying
- sudden convulsive
- great urban
- same casual
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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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