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 university
Below is a list of describing words for university. 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 university:
- dimensional unseen
- somewhat dull and old-fashioned
- two-dimensional unseen
- australian national
- major and prestigious
- pontifical and royal
- warm-hearted northern
- terrifying western
- famous and venerable
- royal and pontifical
- poverty-stricken german
- august and mellow
- good, well-to-do
- now unpretentious
- dull and old-fashioned
- same renowned
- stiffest technical
- moderately drunk
- old and renowned
- african virtual
- desolate alien
- agricultural and classical
- abroad promising
- federal royal
- fine-grained young
- famous light-weight
- all-round democratic
- reluctant and even recalcitrant
- essentially athletic
- one-time glorious
- undenominational provincial
- long-deferred national
- best-known coloured
- purely secular and national
- nobly indigent
- well-founded and well-equipped
- old and world-renowned
- famed laval
- cynical, materialistic
- large northeastern
- tweedy gray
- various bulgarian
- genuine provincial
- small midwestern
- timeless, seamless
- defunct lunar
- national autonomous
- quiet medieval
- nominally canadian
- second-rate german
- good, complete
- pedagogic-philosophical
- anonymous, full
- unparalleled imperial
- good middle-level
- international polytechnical
- prestigious and mysterious
- out-of-date little
- alarmingly clean-cut
- regular, nonmagical
- old renowned
- ancient time-honored
- rich and well-endowed
- wholly autonomous and free
- wholly autonomous
- reputable european
- rollicking and amusing
- secular and national
- bald but lofty
- veritable maritime
- doughty but dogmatic
- major imperial
- wealthy private
- down fugitive
- tenfold larger
- perhaps ill-advised
- efficient and patriotic
- scientific and agricultural
- complete mediaeval
- separate norwegian
- strictly municipal
- exclusive german
- nameless german
- old denominational
- historically black
- well-known eastern
- unique and comprehensive
- once renowned
- autonomous national
- major midwestern
- several well-organized
- famed imperial
- gangling, brilliant
- ivory-tower, white-coated
- fourth richest
- local interplanetary
- oldest and most renowned
- reasonably prestigious
- noble and sumptuous
- pessimistic, cynical
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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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