Describing Words
This tool helps you find adjectives for things that you're trying to describe. Also check out ReverseDictionary.org and RelatedWords.org.
Click words for definitions.
Words to Describe changes
Below is a list of describing words for changes. You can sort the descriptive words by uniqueness or commonness using the button above. Sorry if there's a few unusual suggestions! The algorithm isn't perfect, but it does a pretty good job for most common nouns. Here's the list of words that can be used to describe changes:
- climatal and geographical
- gross geological
- important and sudden
- physiologlcal
- irreversible physiological
- irreversible physiologlcal
- further climatic
- drastic metaphysical
- much-needed structural
- gross overall
- immense and almost universal
- exciting organic
- space-time sequential
- quick immortal
- pastoral and pleasing
- own ranking
- basic over-all
- radical anatomical
- disturbing temporal
- quiet and perfectly legal
- subtle sociological
- simple-seeming, humanitarian
- multiple drastic
- conversational small
- _cyclical
- frightful chemical
- subtle tidal
- analogous and even greater
- unpredictable, idiotic
- dramatic or precipitous
- traceable cosmical
- dramatic and swift
- climatical and geographical
- rapid cultural
- ill-understood organic
- [gradual
- gradual but vital
- slight innate
- amazing, beauteous
- wild disastrous
- rapid and auspicious
- indefinable and vital
- strong physiological
- disastrous climatic
- large-scale atmospheric
- imperceptible ethical
- rapid climactic
- inexplicable but almost chemical
- moderate morphological
- supremely radical
- merely capricious
- repellent psychological
- frequent and merely capricious
- radical and significant
- swift endless
- arbitrary and sudden
- frequent and sometimes sudden
- wonderful jeffersonian
- sudden, crisp
- frustrating feminine
- early degenerative
- dramatic and generally negative
- radical, irrational
- parasitical morphological
- slight but viable
- eccentric meteorological
- similarly abrupt
- climatal and geological
- singularly happy and glorious
- tertiary times--geological
- organic or chemical
- times--geological
- salutary universal
- abominable and almost instantaneous
- complete and most painful
- swift, incessant
- great but transient
- equally refreshing
- baffling, intangible
- subtle atmospheric
- frequent or pointless
- subtle but painful
- thermal nor barometric
- physical or psychochemical
- political or geological
- romantic and even melodramatic
- predictable seasonal
- compellingly apparent
- bewilderingly abrupt
- radical and ill-prepared
- air-especially sudden
- similar consonant
- dreadful geological
- quick tragic
- big qualitative
- catastrophic rapid
- violent ineffectual
- involuntary and frequent
- essential societal
- wrenching internal
Popular Searches
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 analysis it seems that authors of fiction are at least 4x more likely to describe women (as opposed to men) with beauty-related terms (regarding their weight, features and general attractiveness). In fact, "beautiful" is possibly the most widely used adjective for women in all of the world's literature, which is quite in line with the general unidimensional representation of women in many other media forms. If anyone wants to do further research into this, let me know and I can give you a lot more data (for example, there are about 25000 different entries for "woman" - too many to show here).
The blueness of the results represents their relative frequency. You can hover over an item for a second and the frequency score should pop up. The "uniqueness" sorting is default, and thanks to my Complicated Algorithm™, it orders them by the adjectives' uniqueness to that particular noun relative to other nouns (it's actually pretty simple). As you'd expect, you can click the "Sort By Usage Frequency" button to adjectives by their usage frequency for that noun.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source mongodb which was used in this project.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
