Word to describe a story

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.

Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.

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.

Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.

Her sweetheart on board, it would be in a Western story; but these were only her friends, and kin, and townsmen, that were at stake.

We need you to lead our Lichfield germans, and to tell us naughty little stories, and keep us amused.

Sergeant Corney cried, when the sad story had been brought to an end, and I was of the same opinion.

If a man can prove that his upper story is crackt, he can wallop his wife to his heart‘s content; and if anybody interferes, he can popp him off with a six shooter, and the law will stand to his back.

It is a favorite recreation of the moral boot—blacks and pious newsboys of New York to gather in the evening on the steps of Mr. FROTHINGHAM‘S church, and scare each other with thrilling stories of the gentle ANNIE‘S fierce exploits and deeds of daring.

« They all agreed to this sentiment and while the girls attended to their editorial duties they had the amazing story of Thursday Smith uppermost in their minds.

If I was caught I could tell a romantic story about the girl who helped me get off.

They told a funny story of him in London at one of the court balls.

« There is a curious story current about this Bible, which, as it is connected with a popular fiction, I will venture to repeat.

Thou’st entertain’d me with a pretty Story, And call’d up so much Nature to thy Cause, That I am half subjected to its Laws; I find thy lovely Mother plead within too, And bids me put no force upon thy Will; Tells me thy Flame should be as unconfin’d As that we felt when our two Souls combin’d.

One of our friends, a very clever woman and great anti—Bonapartist, told us an amusing story of her little son.

A humorous story is related of the interest which Hannah‘s conversation created in the minds of her elders.

«You have told a remarkable story, mademoiselle, and corroborated it with two important pieces of evidence, which are in themselves almost sufficient to carry conviction,« he said.

Also, we do not credit the equally absurd and unreasonable story that our girlish gusher is a daughter of a negro preacher named LOGUEN.

« She had both elbows on the table and her chin between her hands, and I dare say she had listened in just that attitude to fifty inside stories that the newspapers would scatter gold in vain to get.

(Tiny animal stories)

«Carcassonnewhat‘s that?« «An exquisite bit of verse and a touching story.

By these I move the hearts Of lovers like to thee, and I divert Their minds with pleasant stories.

The Little Giant‘s Neighbours.= A charming nature story of a «little giant« whose neighbours were the creatures of the field and garden.

A TRAGIC STORY There lived a sage in days of yore, And he a handsome pigtail wore; But wondered much and sorrowed more Because it hung behind him.

The plan of the work is magnificent: to represent the wide sweep of English life by gathering a motley company together and letting each class of society tell its own favorite stories.

This ridiculous story was soon known throughout the city, and confirmed the suspicions of the Franciscan monks and magistrates, that the learned guest was in league with the Evil One.

The flat was on the fourth story.

Pulz had brought some extraordinary garish detective stories.

She was very fond of the little boy, and would tell him the «sweet story of old« in so attractive a manner that a deep impression was made upon his heart.

SKIP TO CONTENT