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 tendency
Below is a list of describing words for tendency. 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 tendency:
- fatally aristocratic
- boyish teasing
- mild paranoid
- speculative, theoretical
- equally distinct and remarkable
- strong and involuntary
- perilous evil
- direct but unwitting
- greater variational
- certain anti-semitic
- internal formative
- certain directional
- patriotic and anti-french
- real cerebral
- strange unilateral
- external formative
- noble, indefinable
- pornographical
- increasingly maudlin
- paranoid violent
- ineffectual, ironic
- humoristico-satirical
- discernible humoristico-satirical
- inborn ideal
- internal conservative
- internal metamorphic
- inherent impulsive
- ultimate and comprehensive
- experimental and inventive
- collateral hereditary
- physical consumptive
- savage and satirical
- national imaginative
- strong ancestral
- inscrutable but spiritually necessary
- spiritually necessary
- wisely practical
- continual and most noticeable
- natural bad
- autocritical
- certain autocritical
- own well-understood
- radical and naturalistic
- active skeptical
- empirico-skeptical
- universal, automatic
- specially definite and dogmatic
- assyria--ethical
- strong and native
- one-sided didactic
- evidently retrograde
- broadly prevalent
- least phthisical
- strong divergent
- slight incipient
- inborn parasitic
- null, negative
- innate or necessary
- older moralistic
- dreamy romantic
- traditional and classical
- strong naturalistic
- similar latent
- directly serviceable
- mystic and oriental
- present centrifugal
- generalized self-assertive
- masterful and self-assertive
- self-assertive or masterful
- assertive or masterful
- dominant naturalistic
- increasingly materialistic
- seemingly simple and direct
- certain and fatal
- world-wide anthropomorphic
- slight inborn
- working-man--practical
- agitation--centripetal and centrifugal
- agitation--centripetal
- dumb unconscious
- _schismatical
- freer ecclesiastical
- biblical and practical
- decidedly theosophical
- heretical doctrinal
- prevailingly rationalistic
- further archaic
- generally sceptical
- superstitious and romantic
- general or ultimate
- innate downward
- original formative
- inherent and ubiquitous
- abnormal and inborn
- transcendental and hyperphysical
- steady and rather strong
- mischievous and ruinous
- decidedly anti-constitutional
- contrary and still stronger
- occasional hereditary
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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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