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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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It was during this winter that father, after his return from Cleveland, caught a severe cold.
Summer‘s coming, the Lord be praised, but yet it‘s bitter cold at night with your counterpane gone; and when you‘ve been working hard all day, and nothing but four bare walls to come home to, and all your poor little sticks of furniture that you‘ve saved up for, and got together one by one, all gone, and you no better than when you started, or rather worse, for then you was young.
They will fly as frightened from his approach, unless, possibly, in the intense cold and desolation of winter, when driven together and rendered desperate by hunger, they might be emboldened by starvation to attack a man, but even this is among the apocryphal legends of the wilderness.
Thus they sat happily engrossed for perhaps an hour in the candle light until the extreme cold in that unwarmed room stopped his playing and drove them downstairs to the fire.
« She laughingly answered: «It is only a slight cold, the result of our visit to the peak of old Snow—Top.« He administered such simple remedies as they had at hand, tucked her up warmly in bed and sat by her side until she was asleep.
My oldest daughter, who, I have before mentioned, having taken a violent cold on Lake Erie, was now confined to her bed.
But the coherence of the causes will be more clearly discerned from viewing them in the following series:I. There are spiritual heat and spiritual cold; and spiritual heat is love, and spiritual cold the privation thereof.
«She caught a dreadful cold at the concert yesterday and she can’t lift her head from the pillow.
The reason is, because conjugial cold above all others resides in human minds; for the essential conjugial principle is inscribed on the soul, to the end that a soul may be propagated from a soul, and the soul of the father into the offspring.
But, after these great areas were thus peopled, came the Glacial epoch, during which the excessive cold, to say nothing of depression and ice—covering, must have almost depopulated all the northern parts of Arctogaea, destroying all the higher mammalian forms, except those which, like the Elephant and Rhinoceros, could adjust their coats to the altered conditions.
A traveler in the sub—Arctic is forced by the deadly cold of the North into a near intimacy of living with his fellows.
In cool weather, when the skin is less active, a large amount of water is excreted by the kidneys, as is shown by the experience of those who drive a long distance in severe weather, or who have caught a sudden cold.
On the seashore, winter means raw cold, a pale, gray, angry ocean, fierce winds, and scanty wet snows.
And now she‘s got an awful cold, so she can scarcely breathe, and a fever hot enough to roast an egg.
The quantity of carbon dioxid, however, varies with the age, and is increased also by external cold and by exercise, and is affected by the kind of food.
In one sense, however, the character of the season had changed; the dry, equal cold, that was generally supportable, having been succeeded by tempests that were sometimes a little moist, but oftener of intense frigidity.
He had had rheumatic fever, and the damp cold racked his aching joints; besides, there was nothing for him to do.
The Land of the lonely silence, The Land of the cruel cold, The Land of the lost ambitions Alaska, the Land of gold.
Then, as he glanced at the motionless, dark faces before him, something of utter cold passed into his being, touching his very soul….
The warm glow of the sun with the keen invigorating cold of the air forms a combination which is inexpressibly health—giving and satisfying to me, whilst the golden light on this wonderful scene of mountain and ice satisfies every claim of scenic magnificence.
Are they not prone to perpetual colds in the head, accompanied by loud and labored breathing, and rarely mitigated by the judicious use of pocket—handkerchiefs?
William had come home ill; the hardships of the expedition and the fearful cold of the Arctic Zone had been too much for him.
The soldiers of the Eleventh and Thirteenth legions had, during the winter, supported with rare constancy the fatigues of very difficult marches in intolerable cold.
With many, these are causes of internal cold, but not at the same time of external.
«Miss Lyman had a hoarse cold, but she received about two hundred students, and had all their rooms assigned to them.
What are some descriptive words for Cold ?
Here is a list of words that describe Cold.
Total number of Cold words and adjectives: 46 words
Cold words are listed in alphabetical order.
acold,
anticipation,
arctic,
bitter frost,
chill,
chilliness,
chilly,
cold-blooded,
colder,
coldest,
colding,
coldish,
coldly,
coldness,
cold snap,
cold wave,
common cold,
cool,
coolness,
damp,
freeze,
freezing,
frigid,
frigoric,
frosty,
frozen,
gelid,
gelidity,
glacial,
ice,
ice-cold,
icicle,
iciness,
icy,
low temperature,
norther,
refrigerate,
shiver,
shudder,
snap,
starve,
temperature,
tremble,
unresponsive,
winterkill,
wintery.
Download Cold Words PDF: Descriptive Words for Cold PDF
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