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 status
Below is a list of describing words for status. 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 status:
- exempt
- high socioeconomic
- particular alert
- current menial
- functional adept
- dubious current
- warm, psychological
- military alert
- utterly unjustified
- industrial and professional
- formal colonial
- obvious mutant
- exalted evolutionary
- one-hour alert
- new-found august
- legal, institutional
- comfortably civilized
- nondescript political
- maximum alert
- mentally modern
- exalted economical
- female nutritional
- undeserved social
- nebulous legal
- official august
- low alert
- exact cultural
- new-found heroic
- healthy, cold-war
- latest and most fabulous
- relatively exalted
- greater automatic
- invisibly average
- exceptionally colorful and readable
- exceptionally colorful
- better philosophical
- defective civil
- regular budgetary
- serene social
- hereditary official
- civil, social and economic
- unresolved legal
- full alert
- long-standing free
- official journalistic
- moral, intellectual and economic
- vague, official
- strange, dubious
- sudden legendary
- previous one-man
- questionable spiritual
- indefinite inactive
- obviously dull and dumpy
- obviously dull
- exact decimal
- submissive, secondary
- present ineffectual
- permanent inactive
- al economic
- special extraterritorial
- independent parochial
- intellectual, moral and domestic
- economic, social or political
- exact national
- privileged judicial
- uncertain governmental
- utterly unofficial
- present paradoxical
- legal independent
- quite adept
- full operational
- independent and equal
- permanent civilian
- first-degree adept
- pre-provisional
- disconcerting, long-standing
- suddenly single
- enough semi-official
- new lofty
- current prestigious
- precarious cardiac
- former marital
- transitional autonomous
- legal, twenty-fifth
- unlikely higher
- functional operational
- amber alert
- new, available
- full-time civilian
- comfy apollonian
- o~cial
- uniformly unsolved
- unassailable diplomatic
- revolutionary or embattled
- present inactive
- independent and co-equal
- full hybrid
- active standby
- marital and educational
- ordinary, ready-made
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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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