You can hover over an item for a second and the frequency score should pop up. The blueness of the results represents their relative frequency. 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). 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. 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). 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". The parser simply looks through each book and pulls out the various descriptions of nouns. 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. Eventually I realised that there's a much better way of doing this: parse books! 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. If a sentence begins with a negative adverb or an adverb with restrictive meaning, it must have an inverted word order.Ĭorrect: Never before have I encountered such persistence in a student.Ĭorrect: Seldom do we come across such talent.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). Sometimes, the use of a certain adverb requires the inversion of the subject and the verb. Incorrect: He has been slow recovering from his knee injury.Ĭorrect: He has been slowly recovering from his knee injury. Slowly also appears in sentences with auxiliary verbs where slow cannot be used. It can replace slow anywhere it is used as an adverb. In the first example, slow is an adverb and in the second one, it is an adjective.Ĭorrect: The traffic is moving slow. Slow can be used as an adjective and as an adverb. Incorrect: Students took a really midterm last week.Ĭorrect: Students took a real midterm last week. Real is an adjective, and can be used to modify nouns or noun phrases. Incorrect: Students did real well on the midterm.Ĭorrect: Students did really well on the midterm. Really is an adverb, and it modifies other adverbs, verbs, or adjectives. Incorrect: My friend plays the piano good.Ĭorrect: My friend plays the piano well. Well, when used as an adjective, implies "in good health." When used as an adverb, well means "expertly."Ĭorrect: My grandmother looks well even now in her eighties. Incorrect: It felt well to score an A on the final.Ĭorrect: It felt good to score an A on the final. It is also often used with linking verbs. Incorrect: The players were moving easy around the field.Ĭorrect: The players were moving easily around the field. It is also used with linking verbs.Įasily is an adverb, and it is used to modify verbs. Easy or EasilyĮasy is an adjective used to modify nouns and pronouns. Incorrect: She tried to be brave and take the bad news calm.Ĭorrect: She tried to be brave and take the bad news calmly. Incorrect: She appeared calmly after the accident.Ĭorrect: She appeared calm after the accident. Calm or CalmlyĬalm is an adjective, and it is used to modify nouns and pronouns. Incorrect: Sometimes Hollywood romance ends bad.Ĭorrect: Sometimes Hollywood romance ends badly. Incorrect: I feel badly that he is not taking part in the game.Ĭorrect: I feel bad that he is not taking part in the game.īadly is an adverb used to modify action verbs. Bad or Badlyīad is an adjective used with linking verbs such as feel, seem, be, look, etc. Sometimes an adverb is confused with an adjective similar in meaning.
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