| Chapter 6: Descriptions |

| 6.1. What are descriptions?

It is in describing circumstances that Inform really capitalises on the concise, expressive power of natural language, and this chapter brings together the facts about "descriptions": phrases which refer to things.

The simplest descriptions consist of a noun alone. Some refer to single things ("lantern", or "wine cask"), others to kinds of thing ("dead end" or "container"). But we have also seen adjectives alone:

> The oaken desk is fixed in place.

Here, "fixed in place" is a description which, to Inform's simple-minded grammar, is a single adjective. And of course adjectives and nouns can be combined:

> The cargo trunk is an openable container.

The description "openable container" consists of the noun "container", meaning a kind of thing, and the adjective "openable", which means one of the two possible states of an either/or property held by that thing.

As the next chapter will show, rules also make great use of descriptions:

> Instead of throwing something at a closed openable door, say "Or you could just use the handle like anyone else, of course."

Here "something" and "a closed openable door" are both descriptions. Similarly, we find from elsewhere in this documentation that we can count up the things satisfying a given description ("the number of openable doors") or choose a random one ("a random person in the Drawing Room"), and so on. It is because descriptions are so widely useful that they deserve a chapter of their own, and this is it.

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