Word to describe dresses

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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One of these was an elderly man, of a tall stature, in a plain dress; the other was a short man, in very costly apparel, and some years younger.

They came in grand costume, moving in their fantastic attire with so much aplomb and genteel measure that the stranger found it difficult not to believe them high—born gentlemen, attending a fancy—dress ball.

There‘s always jolly music, pretty dresses, pretty girlsyou don’t mind my saying so, dear, do you?‘ ‘No, indeed.

the child cried, and rushed on, clinging to Mary, dragging her on, her light hair streaming, her little white dress waving.

Happily it was a lovely warm night; and as we got near we saw lots of people walking who had left their carriages some little distance off, hopelessly wedged in a crowd of vehiclesthe women in light dresses, with flowers and jewels in their hair.

In her pink dress, like a thistledown, floating down to him.

That gray dress of hers might, I recollected, betray her if she dared to venture near any town, while her affliction would, of itself, be plain evidence of identification.

On her return home Bessie exclaimed: «Oh, mamma, I have seen the Duchess of Kent, and she had on a brown silk dress«.

The music of a waltz was just beginning, and some of the more enthusiastic spirits had already begun dancing, moving in and out among the uniforms and gay dresses.

At their heels came the royal bodyguard of one hundred bowmen, composed of the finest young men in France, and then two hundred French knights marching on foot with splendid dresses and equipment.

But the little girl sitting high in the back, the one in the torn yellow dress and with blowing cloud—dark hair, cried, «Oh, no fear, it‘s Ivra and her mother and the clear—eyed Earth Child.

A lady’s—maid will have a great deal of «Ironing—out« to do; such as light evening dresses, muslin dresses, &c., which are not dirty enough to be washed, but merely require smoothing out to remove the creases.

Volunteers from Macedonia still in native dress, clerks still in white collars, old men who had perjured themselves about their age in order to get a rifle, and the young conscripts of twenty years came to take the place of the regular forces on the investing lines, who moved on to re—enforce Demetrief.

He was very awkward in his female dress.

On the day set for Madame Esmond‘s entertainment to General Braddock the House of Castlewood was set out with the greatest splendour; and Madame Esmond arrayed herself in a much more magnificent dress than she was accustomed to wear, while the boys were dressed alike in gold—corded frocks, braided waistcoats, silver—hilted sword, and wore each a solitaire.

How much would it cost, a suitable dress, which you could wear again on future occasions, something very simple?« She reflected for some seconds, computing the cost, and also wondering what sum she could ask without bringing down upon herself an immediate refusal and an astonished exclamation from the economical clerk.

This beautiful blonde, of pleasing manners, graceful presence, and a strong vein of sentiment, fostered by the reading of Chateaubriand, met Byron for the first time casually when she came in her bridal dress to one of the Albrizzi reunions; but she was only introduced to him early in the April of the following year, at the house of the Countess Benzoni.

Another man, big and red, named Joe, and a handsome little Creole in elegant dress and full of laughter, wish to stop him, but the flat—boatmen, ha—ha—ing and cheering, will not suffer it.

There were soldiers in civilian dress.

Before a quarter of an hour had passed Miss Falconer seemed to be quite at home in her novel surroundings; and leaning back in her chair, and slowly fanning herself, received with perfect self—possession the attentions which her beauty, her costly dress, and her still more costly jewels merited.

Susie says she had the most lovely dress, like a cloud of smoke, with diamonds sparkling all over it like stars.

He returned the gaze through his placid spectacles; her beauty, in its setting of brilliant dress and furniture, soft lights, flowers, and a thousand feminine surroundings, failed to dazzle him.

Linnet endeavored to coax me out, as it is her holiday afternoon, and Broadway will be alive with handsome dresses and handsome faces, and there are some new paintings to be seen.

It was a peculiar head—dress half a foot high, trimmed in down and feathers.

Here is that child, Amy, in her ugly old shabby dress.

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