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 concepts
Below is a list of describing words for concepts. 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 concepts:
- older, dynamic
- increasingly separate
- sufficiently weird
- awesome and brilliant
- supply robotic
- academic philosophical
- fuzzy abstract
- such relativistic
- clever but believable
- abstract or unfamiliar
- fairly abstract
- common neurotic
- properly negative
- apparently outrageous
- reasonably esthetic
- foolishly material
- alien biologic
- sexual and scatological
- obscene antisurvival
- stupendously awful
- peculiarly australian
- familiar twentieth-century
- entirely notional
- particular, specialized
- somewhat notional
- basic ideological
- frightening, awesome
- psychologically incompatible
- foreign and distressing
- derivative, invidious
- highly un-american
- more community-based
- irresponsible and superficial
- fundamental, new
- vast and awesome
- completely unworthy
- most insane
- always clear-cut
- latest galling
- moldy philosophical
- completely cheerful
- such second-stage
- outmoded mythological
- concrete, spatial
- impersonal geographic
- dangerously emotional
- unknown and intrinsically unknowable
- horrible, immoral
- intrinsically unknowable
- human philosophical
- technically audacious
- early ethical
- discursive or general
- revolutionary fundamental
- indeterminate and immediate
- widely generic
- indifferent theoretical
- transcendental or widely generic
- further mystical
- same widest
- refined aristotelian
- psychological therapeutic
- pregnant new
- puzzling mythological
- evolutionary darwinian
- indeterminate common
- indeterminate and generic
- common and philosophical
- accurate twentieth-century
- new and fleeting
- wide, negative
- exceedingly superfluous
- exclusive and conformist
- esoteric new
- alien and delightful
- multinational financial
- utterly basic
- good three-dimensional
- intriguing alien
- fleeting western
- classic revival
- fascinating and potentially useful
- gaudy, audacious
- workable basic
- basically immature
- distant and purely intellectual
- \-pletely inconsistent
- well-defined mathematical
- equally outmoded
- eminently bothersome
- meticulous civic
- tenuous buddhist
- different astronomical
- hazy, frightening
- currently simplistic
- common or easily acceptable
- superficially independent
- unknowable and terrifying
- nearly interchangeable
- useful and valid
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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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