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 year
Below is a list of describing words for year. 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 year:
- _fiscal
- last fiscal
- present fiscal
- next fiscal
- current fiscal
- past fiscal
- happy new
- freely fiscal
- twenty-fifth new
- vague egyptian
- noisy and blind
- fiscal
- circular current
- next academic
- great flush
- international geophysical
- unprecedented and startling
- medal last
- great climacterical
- again next
- previous fiscal
- breathless last
- burly sixth
- tall and burly sixth
- nineteenth consecutive
- subsequent fiscal
- median astronomical
- solar-astronomical
- eighty-fifth
- richer final
- lunar new
- cryo-revival last
- sandoral last
- expensive next
- thy tenth
- disturbing, exciting
- prior fiscal
- missionary penetrating
- higher fiscal
- good and golden
- last and most pregnant
- heaval next
- nineteenth successive
- asian last
- movable new
- seventh successive
- latest fiscal
- solar astronomical
- fourth centurial
- astronomical solar
- climacterical and dangerous
- thy fiftieth
- dreamy thirteenth
- back next
- sabbatical
- maybe next
- long festal
- ninetieth
- jewish new
- distraught fugitive
- thy ninth
- thirtieth and final
- past galactic
- greedy next
- exceptionally lean
- richer next
- wretched athletic
- sidereal or solar
- surprising, last
- public fiscal
- civil new
- tropical or equinoctial
- tropical solar
- ordeal next
- important commemorative
- thirtieth
- fiftieth
- climacterical
- sometime next
- civil solar
- merry new
- identical, same
- ninth successive
- tall next
- movable egyptian
- seventy-fifth
- fifty-ninth
- unconstitutional last
- young, next
- harpy new
- scandal last
- miserable and unsuccessful
- rogue last
- vintage last
- awful fourteenth
- madrigal next
- stronghold last
- decent next
- common solar
- brilliant next
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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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