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 differences
Below is a list of describing words for differences. 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 differences:
- domestic, sexual
- original or congenital
- cases--sexual
- minimum potential
- individual stylistic
- subtle but highly significant
- significant visible
- aside ethnic
- frank literary
- former sectional
- slight analogous
- sexes--colours--sexual
- significant and positive
- slight and unknown
- scant moral
- african, sexual
- small and inessential
- spanish, sexual
- blue, sexual
- comparative sexual
- red, sexual
- present individual
- small but basic
- psychic and physiological
- vast or wonderful
- angry and great
- slight individual
- grave and almost fatal
- numerous anomalous
- biggest functional
- absolute anatomical
- inconspicuous structural
- terminal potential
- familiar unmistakable
- ecological and behavioural
- larger or general
- inherent psychomental
- final and most striking
- everywhere fractious
- imperceptible but significant
- systematic ideological
- paltry ideological
- irreconcilable cultural
- qualitative and quantitive
- cultural and academic
- visible or temperamental
- electronic-potential
- slight relativistic
- subtle and obvious
- fundamental and unexpected
- many idiosyncratic
- interesting temperamental
- recondite and functional
- vast contemporaneous
- specific and numerical
- aside deep-seated
- also major
- intercommunal
- tempermental
- remarkable and typical
- inheritable genetic
- important characteristic
- black, sexual
- cultural
- essential, definable
- minor, subtle
- overall genetic
- notable and physical
- subtle but immense
- glaring, persistent
- hormonal or chromosomal
- corresponding ideological
- profound and yet subtle
- subtler internal
- slight subliminal
- significant racial
- biggest overt
- traditional and ritual
- cultural or tribal
- weird physiological
- radical and chasmal
- cal and genetic
- temporary and social
- subtle ethnic
- merely temporary and social
- mental moral
- vast temperamental
- likely dietary
- life--essential
- local or seasonal
- genuine empirical
- altogether fundamental
- insists--capital
- striking and altogether fundamental
- bodily distemper--material
- crosses--individual
- distemper--material
- functions--reciprocal crosses--individual
- superlative and divine
- apes--external
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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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