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 the colonel
Below is a list of describing words for the colonel. 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 the colonel:
- newly self-proclaimed
- stout danish
- thin-lipped, cool
- aware, worthy
- suspicious german
- pallid black-haired
- prosy, sensible
- mendacious and persuasive
- rubicund, bald
- rubicund bald
- resolute and most immaculate
- redheaded former
- apparently teenage
- dead hungarian
- roughly generous
- unsympathetic and audacious
- peppery or tedious
- artful and gallant
- red-faced, coarse
- fascinating, deceitful
- discontented and irritable
- brave and most excellent
- neal, late
- serenely practical
- genial and loquacious
- witty provincial
- skilled and gallant
- massive past
- youngish australian
- extremely honest and patriotic
- important and very stout
- dogmatic european
- calmly energetic
- military honorary
- benevolent and long-suffering
- ill-disposed old
- bold civilian
- dear, fearless
- crafty hessian
- always willing and courteous
- stiff and immaculate
- titular foreign
- swiss regimental
- gaudy italian
- acute middle-aged
- however deep and true
- perplexed, expectant
- somewhat grave and silent
- rigorous and methodical
- mild and gawky
- wicked cunning
- present gallant
- previously punctual
- colonel--real old
- tall, clever
- strange cuban
- fat doggie
- balding full
- usually gungho
- gungho
- insistent and overbearing
- burly full
- tanned and happy
- sweaty imperial
- white-haired full
- competent but irksome
- dear high
- gallant and philanthropic
- resplendent ducal
- diplomatic old
- energetic and plucky
- present honorary
- ever courteous and thoughtful
- frank and obliging
- brave and genial
- puissant and patriotic
- good metaphorical
- genial, plausible
- young and gorgeous
- lately beleaguered
- indefatigable and indomitable
- bold and wise
- rumpled and unshaven
- hatchet-faced young
- famous and cruel
- pale and prostrate
- once cheery
- beautiful present
- however deep
- well-known georgian
- brave and modest
- gallant and handsome
- lean and fanatical
- scarred, bearded
- sober and repentant
- ambitious and rebellious
- welcome and brief
- weary medical
- certain sicilian
- deeper, dear
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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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