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 viruses
Below is a list of describing words for viruses. 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 viruses:
- meningial
- hideously destructive
- rna-based
- insidious and terrible
- endogenous retro
- crystal black
- synthetic, human
- communal, intelligent
- current and active
- devastating, two-dimensional
- similarly condensed
- old tutorial
- favorite cultural
- other endogenous
- damn cultural
- original intestinal
- key cultural
- devastatingly lethal
- complex super
- obscene alien
- respiratory syncytial
- virulent sociopolitical
- everyday cold
- next custom-made
- short-term gastric
- simple parasitic
- progressively stronger and stronger
- deadly cosmological
- monstrous artificial
- intrusive or destructive
- wild, malevolent
- passive human
- old endogenous
- murderous psychological
- damn tame
- truly airborne
- particular, airborne
- enough infectious
- deadly man-made
- highly survivable
- crucial commensal
- native fungal
- short-lived defensive
- annoying low-grade
- also dormant
- deadly selective
- fatal and unknown
- short-term synthetic
- temporary and synthetic
- human-lethal
- lousy british
- poten�tially lethal
- perfect peacekeeping
- aids-like
- new aids-like
- kinda creepy
- exotic meningeal
- extremely communicable
- corrosive digestive
- mysterious and highly contagious
- foul genetic
- untested transgenic
- harmless endemic
- so-called baal
- goddamned new
- pure bovine
- fresh bovine
- unknown special
- vaccinal
- effective cold
- deadly airborne
- totally effective
- earlier experimental
- deadly super
- particular paranoid
- new, harmless
- syncytial
- anti-biological
- nasty corrosive
- virulent but short-lived
- actively malicious
- common cold
- relatively innocuous
- powerful cultural
- previously harmless
- progressively stronger
- so-called peacekeeping
- nanosurgical
- such bovine
- same resistant
- fresh limpid
- nasty new
- new terrestrial
- new and lethal
- rather worrisome
- little intestinal
- damned fake
- particularly infectious
- highly portable
- potentially infectious
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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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