You could try searching for collocations + the word you want the adjectives, nouns, or even verbs paired to.
According to ODO collocations are
- The habitual juxtaposition of a particular word with another word or words with a frequency greater than chance.
‘the words have a similar range of collocation’
- A pair or group of words that are habitually juxtaposed.
‘‘strong tea’ and ‘heavy drinker’ are typical English collocations’
For example, a search for collocations+pain returned the following (amongst others) from the Online OXFORD Collocation Dictionary:
acute, agonizing, awful, excruciating, extreme, great, intense, severe, sharp, terrible, unbearable | burning, searing, shooting, stabbing, throbbing, etc.
A search for collocations+acute rendered the following results amongst others:
↑agitation, ↑angle, ↑anxiety, ↑appendicitis, ↑asthma, ↑attack, ↑awareness, ↑case, ↑complication, ↑crisis, ↑danger, ↑depression, ↑diarrhoea, ↑dilemma, ↑discomfort, ↑disease, ↑distress, etc.
Edited to add the following
Thanks 3omarz!
I found two more online collocation dictionary sources which in my opinion will be helpful and more accurate than the previously cited references
Flax Interactive Language Learning
This online tool appears to be thorough. According to their about section
"There are many definitions of collocation. We think of collocations in the same way as expressed by Benson et al.: "In any language, certain words combine with certain other words or grammatical constructions. These recurrent, semi-fixed combinations, or collocations, can be divided into two groups: grammatical collocations and lexical collocations."
Enter this collection to search for the company words keep.
How words form into collocational patterns will be revealed by looking across
the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) reference corpus,
the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus of 2500 university student writing texts
the Wikipedia crowd-sourced corpus of three million articles.**
Just The Word describe themselves as
a completely new kind of aid to help you with writing English and choosing just the word.
I suggest you click the "getting started" and "more help" links to get more out of the resource.
