You could try searching for [**collocations**][1] + the word you want the adjectives, nouns, or even verbs paired to. According to [ODO][2] 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**][3] 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**][4] 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][5]! 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**][6] 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**][7] 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][8]" and "[more help][9]" links to get more out of the resource. [1]: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/collocation [2]: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/ [3]: http://oxforddictionary.so8848.com/search?word=pain [4]: http://collocations.enacademic.com/187/acute [5]: https://english.stackexchange.com/users/115700/3omarz [6]: http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=g&rt=r&sa=CollocationQuery&s=CollocationQuery&c=collocations&s1.title=&s1.threshold=0.5&s1.startNum=0&s1.sampleNum=10&s1.perPage=20&s1.type=&s1.wordType=&s1.colloType=&s1.query=acute&s1.dbName=Wikipedia [7]: http://www.just-the-word.com/main.pl?word=pain&mode=combinations [8]: http://www.just-the-word.com/jtw_questions.html [9]: http://www.just-the-word.com/help.html