![]() The choice of using "utterly" might have more to do with the adjective itself than how it's being used in context. A few of these are words that are typically negative but in context were used in a positive sense: outrageous, strange. Six of these were nouns used in names using "utterly" with a noun generally doesn't occur in speech, so these names are unusual. ridiculous (blog title intended connotation unclear)Īlmost half of these are clearly negative. true (part of title: The Utterly True Adventures of a Pathological Liar. horses (name of a website: Utterly Horses)Ģ6. A quick google for "utterly" shows the word utterly used with these words, in order :Ĥ. but I think Pos is right that it's used with negative words for often. It can certainly be used with positive words - "utterly gorgeous", "utterly brilliant", etc. When you think about it, words ultimately had to come from somewhere, but you only have sounds to work with, so it wouldn't surprise me that the sound of a word can have a greater effect on its meaning - or the meaning of a word can have an effect on its sound - than might be first apparent. :)īut all of those sounds have "ur" in a stressed position (indeed, most of them are monosyllables), whereas "utter" has it in an unstressed position, where it doesn't have as strong as an effect. but I can't really think of many positive words that have the "ur" sound, other than "purr", "flirt".įinally, "turkey" is just comical rather than positive or negative. Some are more neutral, like herd, urge, surge, quirk, discern, concur, circle, circa. A lot of words with a "ur" sound in them have some kind of negative association with them: burp, usurp, twerp, turd, nerd, slur, hurt, dirt, jerk, lurk, lurch, murky, stern. but I think there's something to the sound theory. Of course, all this is just conjecture on my part. The schwa at the beginning doesn't really help there, either. sounds like something a caveman might say. There's something about the "ur" sound that is a just little rough. ![]() It's not one of the harshest-sounding words in the language, but it's not particularly euphonic, either, especially in rhotic dialects (like most American English) with the terminal "r". It could also just be the sound of the word. It could be that these phrases became common first, and then their commonality associated the word "utter" with negativity. There are some particularly common examples with negative words: "utter chaos" and "utter ruins" leap to mind most readily. People see utter/utterly used more often with negative adjectives, so they tend to use it that way themselves, which reinforces the association with negativity. To learn more, see the privacy policy.I don't think there's really any reason. Please note that Related Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used to bring you this list of term themed words: Concept Net, WordNet, and is still lots of work to be done to get this to give consistently good results, but I think it's at the stage where it could be useful to people, which is why I released it. You will probably get some weird results every now and then - that's just the nature of the engine in its current state. related words - rather than just direct synonyms.Īs well as finding words related to other words, you can enter phrases and it should give you related words and phrases, so long as the phrase/sentence you entered isn't too long. These algorithms, and several more, are what allows Related Words to give you. Another algorithm crawls through Concept Net to find words which have some meaningful relationship with your query. The vectors of the words in your query are compared to a huge database of of pre-computed vectors to find similar words. One such algorithm uses word embedding to convert words into many dimensional vectors which represent their meanings. Related Words runs on several different algorithms which compete to get their results higher in the list.
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