Explanation:

you're getting strange results, it may be that your query isn't quite in the right format. The search box should be a simple word or phrase, like "tiger" or "blue eyes". A search for words to describe "people who have blue eyes" will likely return zero results. So if you're not getting ideal results, check that your search term, "shopkeeper" isn't confusing the engine in this manner.

Note also that if there aren't many shopkeeper adjectives, or if there are none at all, it could be that your search term has an abiguous part-of-speech. For example, the word "blue" can be an noun and an adjective. This confuses the engine and so you might not get many adjectives describing it. I may look into fixing this in the future. You might also be wondering: What type of word is shopkeeper?

Describing Words

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