Word time used as an adjective

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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In English, we often refer to periods of time as nouns. This means we name the period of time, and it may be used as a subject or object. Centuries, years, months, weeks, hours, and times of day can all be specific nouns.

• I do yoga on the second morning each week.
• My birthday is in the third month of the year.
• The 19^th century was a time of great expansion.

In these cases, we use the and a particular adjective (often an ordinal number – one in a series) to define the particular period of time.

The use of an article in this case depends on the same rules that apply to general nouns. If we know the exact period of time, we use the, if we don’t, we can use a, or if we are referring to more than one period of time we can treat it as a plural.

• This is the day of my birth.
• It was a cold day in spring.
• We can meet any day next week.

When a time period is used as an adjective

In English we often use nouns to describe the quality of another noun.

• George Eliot was a successful 19^th century novelist.

The describing noun is used as an adjective, so it does not require an article. But the noun it describes (novelist) does. In this case, though we know the 19^th century was a defined period, we are not talking about the period, we are using the period to describe the novelist. In this way, the time period becomes the same as an adjective defining time, for instance old or new. So we use a for novelist, as she was one of many, and the adjectives, between the article and the noun, do not require articles of their own.

We can build the idea like this:

She was a novelist. She was a successful novelist. She was a successful 19^th century novelist.

Using time periods as nouns is common when the time period represents a recognised style, or way or life, for instance referring to centuries, wars, ruling eras or art movements. This is because the period of time defines the qualities of the noun – just as ‘a Georgian house’ is associated with ‘the Georgian period’ for its particular style, ‘19^th century industrialism’ is particular to ‘the 19^th century’.

Periods of time are not limited to numbers: any noun that can be defined as a recognised time periods can follow a similar pattern. For example, seasons, wars, and important events.

• Let’s visit Brighton in the summer. (or this summer) but I don’t have any summer clothing.
• This is a fine Civil War rifle. but It was used during the Civil War.

If you want your articles to agree with the noun, to avoid confusing your adjectives and nouns look at the last word in the description. As adjectives come before the noun, it is the last word that is defined by the article, not the describing words in between. Take out the adjectives between the article and final noun, and the article should make sense:

• She was a successful 19^th century novelist. = She was a novelist.
• She was the successful 19^th century novelist. = She was the novelist.

The definite article would only be appropriate here if we were defining the novelist specifically.

For time periods, this may be useful if you want to identify a noun by the time it relates to.

• We read novels from each century. My favourite were the 19^th century novels. (it defines which novels)

But on its own:

• I am reading a 19^th century novel. (the novel is undefined)

When time periods can replace articles

The time period may take the place of an article if it defines a general noun, in the same way that a similar adjective would. This is common for generalisations or regular events defined by their time period.

• I love old clothes.
• I love 19^th century art.
• Let’s meet during afternoon break.

Articles and time periods Exercise

Complete the following sentences with an appropriate article or defining word.

Example:

He liked to read ____ 19^th century books. (no article – books is plural)

1. We visited ____ beautiful medieval castle.
2. ____ 18^th century boats were built to last.
3. ____ 19^th century school is still standing today.
4. Please hand in ____ weekly report.
5. Kyle had ____ summer classes.
6. Who had the largest Empire in ____ 14^th century?
7. Is it time for ____ afternoon break?
8. Of all the Renaissance artists we saw, I like ____ 15^th century painters best.
9. ____ 18^th century France was a dangerous place for the rich.
10. In ____ fifth week of the year, we will go on holiday.
11. Our business group meets on ____ third Friday each month.
12. The museum has ____ 20^th century cars.
13. Brighton Palace Pier opened at the end of ____ 19^th century.
14. Charlotte Bronte was ____  very popular 19^th century writer.
15. ____ Cold War bunkers still exist in London.

Suggested Answers

1. We visited a beautiful medieval castle.
2. 18^th century boats were built to last. (a generalisation)
3. The 19^th century school is still standing today. (a specific school)
4. Please hand in the weekly report.
5. Kyle had summer classes.
6. Who had the largest Empire in the 14^th century?
7. Is it time for afternoon break? (or the)
8. Of all the Renaissance artists we saw, I like the 15^th century painters best.
9. 18^th century France was a dangerous place for the rich.
10. In the fifth week of the year, we will go on holiday.
11. Our business group meets on the third Friday each month.
12. The museum has many 20^th century cars. (or no article)
13. Brighton Palace Pier opened at the end of the19^th century.
14. Charlotte Bronte was a very popular 19^th century writer.
15. Some Cold War bunkers still exist in London. (or no article)

For more examples, and a longer exercise testing this use of articles, please visit this exercise post.