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 welfare
Below is a list of describing words for welfare. 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 welfare:
- mutual and general
- normal expansive
- physical, personal
- collective and permanent
- increasingly insolvent
- eternal and not temporal
- moral or educational
- social, national and universal
- little total
- wasteful and outmoded
- temporal and eternal
- spiritual and phys�ical
- spiritual and phys\-ical
- imperial biological
- general, ultimate
- abiding general
- general voluminous
- individual, national and racial
- spiritooal and temporal
- humanly superhuman
- index--physical
- individual or professional
- temporal, moral and spiritual
- material, civil or moral
- over-all economic
- moral, sanitary and political
- sanitary, political and religious
- weal and thy
- temporal, spiritual and eternal
- sovereign chemical
- momentary or individual
- tangible metallic
- rare, economic
- present or spiritual
- present and eternal
- favorable and generous
- material and educational
- legal, social
- human temporal
- mutual general
- beloved medical
- good and eternal
- individual, social and political
- greater common
- comprehensive social
- present and everlasting
- useless federal
- pointless do-gooder
- moral, financial and personal
- material and structural
- ecological and sociological
- individual, domestic and social
- generous social
- present and then eternal
- individual and eternal
- superb and insolent
- temporal but spiritual
- civic, public
- educational, moral and religious
- maximum general
- sanitary and political
- western municipal
- responsible overseas
- material, moral and educational
- material or educational
- insecure, human
- physical or economic
- good and general
- temporal and religious
- individual or national
- social, educational and religious
- social, political and scientific
- general and religious
- immediate, tangible
- temporal and material
- spiritual and everlasting
- apotential
- general and mutual
- educational and spiritual
- civil or moral
- governmental and industrial
- spiritual or corporal
- spiritual and mundane
- true civic
- consummate human
- immediate and remote
- private or individual
- individual and universal
- temporal and spiritual
- social, intellectual and moral
- public and individual
- moral, intellectual and material
- pure public
- spiritual and financial
- physical, moral and mental
- remote and general
- chiefly domestic
- spiritual and eternal
- spiritual and temporal
- extra medical
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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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