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 theory
Below is a list of describing words for theory. 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 theory:
- communist legal
- numerical lunar
- marxist-leninist legal
- preposterous legal
- straightforward scientific
- tentative but improbable
- convoluted biblical
- apply kinetic
- unofficial general
- current archaeological
- complete unified
- general temporal
- standard basic
- fantastic legal
- pernicious and demented
- current anthropological
- french penal
- hazy atomic
- nice paranoid
- consistent, unified
- so-called vertebral
- untried visionary
- distinctively darwinian
- chemical or experimental
- arcane hyperdimensional
- nice, paranoid
- bizarre and very repugnant
- french semantic
- disastrously correct
- essentially partial
- essentially partial and erroneous
- cold abstract
- misleading and comfortable
- genetic historical
- rigid sacramental
- modern logical
- copernican
- defensive magical
- radical and perhaps heretical
- scientifically verifiable
- unpleasantly consistent
- pure anthropological
- simpler astrological
- prevalent anthropological
- nice scientific
- unsound and most dangerous
- algebraical and numerical
- nice abstract
- whole darwinian
- wild contemporary
- erroneous democratic
- _mediaeval political
- new, stupendous
- ostensibly scientific
- visionary and baneful
- modern kinetic
- quasi-vertebral
- whole oratorical
- pyknotic
- neoclassical dramatic
- simple, prudent
- strictest static
- celestial mythic
- tolerable logical
- kosmogonical
- kosmological and kosmogonical
- kosmological
- mechanical and disheartening
- wholly mechanical and disheartening
- theological cometary
- old insufficient
- credible and consistent
- convenient and flexible
- vast, speculative
- exhaustive and logical
- old protectionist
- ingenious and extraordinary
- enlightened medical
- damned scientific
- bio-sociological
- grand unified
- absurd but necessary
- romantic and naive
- feminist legal
- convoluted psychoanalytic
- current atomic
- crazed theological
- current half-baked
- universal structural
- long-awaited mathematical
- heretical but persistent
- basic musical
- vague original
- present applicable
- cut-and-dried scientific
- semi-sensational
- septic and antiseptic
- extremely disputable
- tenderly perverse
- prevalent orthodox
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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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