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 traditions
Below is a list of describing words for traditions. 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 traditions:
- proud nomadic
- ancient and unremarkable
- airy continental
- long-established piratical
- separate phonetic
- useless or archaic
- shocking and primordial
- western esoteric
- well-established horticultural
- early oral
- european aristocratic
- wicked, filthy
- best and really highest
- strong, political
- magnificent proud
- curious storied
- preferred oral
- artificial, classical
- effective classical
- old but unauthentic
- stable ancient
- military-intellectual
- vague and local
- probably heretical
- apparent archaic
- obscure and probably heretical
- fine and truly aristocratic
- long-standing revolutionary
- oral and mystical
- long martial
- japanese culinary
- exceedingly strong and steady
- erroneous mexican
- primitively veracious
- saner classical
- ecclesiastical and apostolical
- rich and poetic
- cosmopolitan military
- ancient and gracious
- formidable oral
- esoteric oral
- shamanistic buddhist
- ohuivo--local
- western, mathematical
- unanimous and apparently independent
- cloistered virginal
- union-political
- old faulknerian
- certain outworn
- hazy oral
- unusually rich and conscious
- bare successive
- celtic popular
- outdated and annoying
- worthiest and most picturesque
- survival and literary
- dim and portentous
- oral shakespearean
- oftentimes local
- indistinct apostolic
- indistinct and dubious
- unwritten jewish
- altogether untrustworthy
- triumphant mystical
- special home-grown
- jewish legendary
- late but apparently reliable
- inborn, ingrained
- true collegiate
- healthy and heroic
- quasi-moral
- buddhist and japanese
- sophisticated and ancient
- chinese, buddhist and japanese
- older jeffersonian
- evident and significant
- rich mythic
- richest cultural
- baltic seafaring
- designedly allegorical and abstruse
- formulaic oral
- designedly allegorical
- german irrational
- various mythico-historical
- victorian fictional
- old and archaic
- shadowy and mighty
- noble or monarchical
- oral or literary
- unwritten dogmatical
- best psychoanalytic
- time-honored sacred
- once proud and great
- essentially solemn
- local and inexplicable
- glorious civic
- mere and incredible
- positive ancient
- lifelessly geometrical
- inconsistent british
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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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