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 classifications
Below is a list of describing words for classifications. 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 classifications:
- emotional and scientific
- popular comprehensive
- standardized military
- broad functional
- coarse racial
- standard stellar
- arbitrary and imperfect
- rough initial
- provisional or artificial
- equal and logical
- tentative diagnostic
- reliable systematic
- symptomological
- complete botanical
- forward convenient
- imperfect serial
- routine and wholesale
- primary rough
- hypothetical or provisional
- rough and purely provisional
- ethnological and chronological
- rough but popular
- mainly practical and social
- pitiless maternal
- confusing easy
- rapid or popular
- late, impartial
- hypothetically chronological
- useful and unavoidable
- systematic methodical
- concentric and systematic
- capricious and anomalous
- scientific, ethical
- unbelieving and pessimistic
- essentially unbelieving and pessimistic
- essentially unbelieving
- accurate and final
- ordinary and evident
- dull and seemingly useless
- hard, straightforward
- obvious but not sharp
- henceforth rigid
- primarily zoological
- truly etiological
- desirable and advantageous
- [terminological
- scientific and acceptable
- criticised--general
- unscientific and incomplete
- systematic and rational
- satisfactory pathological
- simple, intelligible and truthful
- tri-logical
- strict zoological
- systematic or theoretical
- rough triple
- doubtful clinical
- corresponding arbitrary
- obvious grammatical
- strict biological
- low general
- limited organic
- official taxonomical
- demographically precise
- highest secret
- also territorial
- precise generic
- theoretical, frivolous
- just high-priority
- numerous stellar
- y-chromosomal ethnic
- civic and aristocratic
- obviously primitive
- poor, superficial
- usual archaeological
- preferred primary
- general complete
- artificial and unproductive
- joint western
- old zonal
- subsequent zo�logical
- subsequent zooelogical
- exact and adequate
- reliable such
- simplest and best-known
- intelligible and truthful
- acceptable and clean-cut
- french physiological
- --tactical
- superior or aristocratic
- modern botanical
- broadest and most general
- proper botanical
- philological and physiological
- current contemporary
- new anatomical
- purely provisional
- extensive official
- rigid and logical
- extensive and convenient
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.
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