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 utility
Below is a list of describing words for utility. 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 utility:
- social marginal
- great cost-saving
- primary civic
- austere metallic
- tenable ultimate
- essential and extensive
- relative marginal
- specific effective
- higher marginal
- direct proximate
- total effective
- social organic
- immense, human
- large but hardly conspicuous
- austere, metallic
- naked practical
- contrary, infinite
- relative and practical
- obvious, direct
- extraordinary polemical
- obvious evident
- incalculable and god-like
- great or singular
- trapezoidal little
- total and marginal
- smallest, simple
- all-round, practical
- shifty general
- fourth, incidental
- singular and comprehensive
- original evolutional
- equal final
- effective specific
- excesses--moral
- intellectual excesses--moral
- typical electric
- twofold and most conspicuous
- --personal and social
- practical and widespread
- marginal and effective
- intensive marginal
- general valuable
- apparent and illusory
- actual and reciprocal
- utility--general
- undisputed constitutional
- cost-saving
- hardly conspicuous
- highest and most practical
- narrowly specialized
- economic general
- extreme and overwhelming
- general and not special
- commercial or public
- great and plain
- exclusively public
- rather innocuous
- cheap and soulless
- certainly timeless
- old but tough-looking
- survival and ultimate
- unobtrusive brown
- bleak functional
- extreme functional
- czech electrical
- specific marginal
- real marginal
- almost indispensible
- equal and perhaps greater
- obvious and practical
- incalculable public
- final or marginal
- numerous overhead
- simply bread-and-butter
- total absolute
- last or marginal
- general marginal
- worth and sure
- characteristic, social
- worth and honest
- practical, national
- miniature public
- greatest fundamental
- net material
- commercial public
- scant practical
- immediate or obvious
- visible and direct
- high final
- unpretentious, plain
- subsequential
- ubiquitous little
- translucent bluish
- striking public
- present obvious
- tac\-tical
- unfinished concrete
- general
- inefficient electric
- generic janitorial
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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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