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 definitions
Below is a list of describing words for definitions. 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 definitions:
- circular and tautological
- completely circular and tautological
- commonest latter-day
- mysterious but suggestive
- truly robotic
- completely fitting
- wholly picturesque
- judicial and statutory
- ingly fine
- famous childish
- fast impossible
- hard and fast impossible
- wrong lexical
- strict and exhaustive
- altogether impartial and independent
- strictly adequate
- precise and strictly adequate
- traditional technical
- rigid binary
- absolute western
- luminous and precise
- different, operational
- different operational
- rigid and rather narrow
- scientifically inclusive
- chemically scientific
- higher, mathematical
- invasive-contextual
- careful and strictly consistent
- rigorous theological
- tangible and incontestable
- last, open-ended
- essential but incomplete
- perfect factual
- varying metaphysical
- precise human
- idle, virtuous
- good, simple and intelligible
- traditional hacking
- correct abstract
- short, abstract
- clearer constitutional
- so-called genetic
- fatal and ignoble
- fundamentally perverse
- perfectly clear and specific
- famed aristotelian
- clear clinical
- popular and careless
- better pictorial
- nearly unmistakable
- completely circular
- petty materialistic
- savage and arbitrary
- false or faulty
- simplest new
- erroneous or arbitrary
- furthest abstract
- new and brief
- succinct possible
- pompous and ridiculous
- long-sought and never-to-be-forgotten
- fanciful isothermal
- satisfactory inclusive
- almost hieroglyphical
- arbitrary and unauthorized
- best classificatory
- superlative, necessary
- exhaustive or concise
- geometrico-mathematical
- exquisitely clear and concise
- same five-fold
- superfluous and meaningless
- empty and blank
- essentially injurious
- naughty masculine
- false and essentially injurious
- varyingly precise
- negative and antithetical
- original tentative
- solemn and ordinary
- adequate and fruitful
- clear theological
- correct but concise
- causal and genetic
- unlucky and maimed
- ready-made verbal
- neat and apt
- destructive and contradictory
- eloquent and exact
- mutually destructive and contradictory
- clear, rational and sufficient
- many--daily infallible
- philosophic and beautiful
- independent quantitative
- suggestive, philosophic and beautiful
- geometrical or kinematical
- well-known socialistic
- remarkably plain and concise
- exact and well-understood
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.
