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 town
Below is a list of describing words for town. 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 town:
- southwestern algerian
- sleepy, gloomy
- royal capital
- large and well-fortified
- nearest cathedral
- great ingenious
- fair-sized, walled
- wealthy, detestable
- professionally arty
- subtly fearsome
- twelfth largest
- wealthy, populous
- old or outer
- beautiful and somewhat conservative
- queer cosmic
- accurate medieval
- theoretical and intentional
- just low and ordinary
- neat and orderly little
- unusually steep and abrupt
- obscure ukrainian
- distant well-fortified
- marvelously peaceful and prosperous
- marvelously peaceful
- victorian small
- hard, stingy
- white-walled distant
- heroic but wretched
- quiet but anxiously expectant
- insignificant midwestern
- commercial and yet romantic
- educational and academical
- obscenely frightening
- sizable residential
- romantic imperial
- prosperous brisk
- old-fashioned, silent
- algerian upper
- unpicturesque, wooden
- rusty, forlorn
- poor, antique
- honest new
- venerable moorish
- academic old
- nowhere midwestern
- last tibetan
- old, shady
- one-newspaper
- incestuous small
- compact walled
- quiet coastal
- little helter-skelter
- populous and considerable
- sleepy, provincial
- largish provincial
- prettiest and cleanest
- lifeless mexican
- nearest bolivian
- great and singularly foolish
- poor and tottering
- fevered and benighted
- rough, riotous
- far rustic
- old walled
- small provincial
- primitive foreign
- beloved, benighted
- ramshackle aboriginal
- gloomy coastal
- dismal hideous
- dead-end seaside
- close-mouthed provincial
- ancient and truly famous
- single walled
- second nearest
- carbury-coastal
- closest larger
- lousy two-bit
- ordinary polish
- out-of-the-way norwegian
- last peruvian
- quiet and immemorially ancient
- capacious walled
- far-off noisy
- provincial italian
- spanish walled
- remote syrian
- upper or moorish
- lately fair and prosperous
- lately fair
- unpicturesque little
- old-fashioned, rickety
- often crooked and narrow
- metropolitan small
- upper new
- uninteresting commonplace
- moorish piratical
- populous, desolate
- yellowish little
- old, working-class
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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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