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 difference
Below is a list of describing words for difference. 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 difference:
- original or congenital
- minimum potential
- subtle but highly significant
- significant visible
- frank literary
- significant and positive
- scant moral
- small and inessential
- blue, sexual
- red, sexual
- small but basic
- vast or wonderful
- angry and great
- grave and almost fatal
- biggest functional
- inconspicuous structural
- terminal potential
- familiar unmistakable
- larger or general
- final and most striking
- imperceptible but significant
- paltry ideological
- qualitative and quantitive
- visible or temperamental
- slight relativistic
- fundamental and unexpected
- interesting temperamental
- tempermental
- inheritable genetic
- black, sexual
- cultural
- essential, definable
- overall genetic
- subtle but immense
- hormonal or chromosomal
- profound and yet subtle
- slight subliminal
- biggest overt
- cultural or tribal
- radical and chasmal
- temporary and social
- merely temporary and social
- vast temperamental
- life--essential
- genuine empirical
- insists--capital
- bodily distemper--material
- distemper--material
- superlative and divine
- least morphological
- equal, last
- wide and definite
- mere typological
- great irreconcilable
- sharp visible
- twelve-hour time-zone
- strong particular
- intriguing physical
- noticeable but not significant
- actual physiologic
- big psychological
- genuine ideological
- minor mutational
- frequently harsh
- real and wide
- such _essential
- temperamental and general
- vast and startling
- equal sexual
- substantial and vast
- potential or potential
- similar constant
- widest and most infinite
- wide and essential
- aboriginal or remote
- real and most material
- impressive or significant
- great or radical
- slight and constant
- partial or relative
- unaccountable, inevitable
- essential and immeasurable
- vast and truly glorious
- fundamental and immeasurably great
- great and yet manifest
- mere terminological
- mearly accedental
- little noticeable
- clear robotic
- subtle kinesthetic
- wide temperamental
- slight individual
- striking and fundamental
- dramatic and usable
- conspicuous visible
- tiniest detectable
- small discernible
- erotic and delightful
- highly erotic and delightful
- huge practical
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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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