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 commands
Below is a list of describing words for commands. 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 commands:
- direct and sacred
- royally utter
- chinese, flawless
- utter and indisputable
- also shrill
- german higher
- ragged and bloodied
- implacable, positive
- inexplicable and imperious
- access-denial
- cryptic but powerful
- brilliant independent
- nonverbal emotional
- key verbal
- terse, decisive
- strong subliminal
- direct, manual
- positive and limited
- turkish higher
- sudden, guttural
- turkish high
- last and most peremptory
- steady ineluctable
- astonishing, irresponsible
- military high
- civilian provincial
- tensely sharp
- ineffective mental
- solid overall
- brisk verbal
- external manual
- largely petty and foolish
- distant honorable
- largely petty
- military or provincial
- rigorous or unreasonable
- british higher
- specific, divine
- singular, powerful
- german high
- basic additional
- explicit supplementary
- awful, thy
- presumptuous, illegal
- minor chief
- mute but unmistakable
- more-or-less obscure
- sharp, magical
- direct and distinguishable
- undeniably purposeful
- sundry urgent
- intergal high
- quiet vocal
- electro-dynamically neutral
- unconscious, effortless
- holy wise
- high and successful
- probably severe and unjust
- seemingly insolent
- unique, thy
- mild benign
- arbitrary or obscure
- particularly arbitrary or obscure
- particularly arbitrary
- preparatory oral
- easy and selfish
- curt authoritative
- truthful counterfeit
- calm and patriarchal
- strange imperative
- fortunate and unfailing
- special and peremptory
- admirable instinctive
- angry, imperious
- booming human
- manual and verbal
- french high
- incomprehensible and ludicrous
- latent general
- rapid, savage
- deliberate mathematical
- shrill, simultaneous
- least, strategic
- new corporal
- oddly stern and gentle
- senior present
- oddly stern
- unreasonable and ruinous
- valid royal
- unreasonable and imperious
- disorganized new
- mighty verbal
- slim planetary
- perfect and legal
- on-line operative
- serene powerful
- fateful, desperate
- whimsical and unreasonable
- italian high
- tardy telepathic
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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