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 difficulties
Below is a list of describing words for difficulties. 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 difficulties:
- unique and apparently insurmountable
- great semantic
- piteous and wonderful
- persistent and irreconcilable
- apparent and gravest
- organizational and political
- present insuperable
- again unforeseen
- unforeseen political
- serious special
- insuperable diplomatic
- greatest and most insuperable
- three-way matrimonial
- post-war financial
- immediate logistical
- unavoidable pecuniary
- insuperable practical
- economic but psychological
- present insurmountable
- almost insuperable
- narrow-minded, scented
- serious budgetary
- foggy, more
- prodigiously petty
- abstract judicial
- always insuperable
- insurmountable prospective
- insuperable scientific
- fresh infinitesimal
- formidable but not insuperable
- small and apparently temporary
- unforeseen and unwelcome
- new sino-soviet
- red, formidable
- new and innumerable
- glaringly clear
- disposal or other
- unforeseen and inexplicable
- great and inextricable
- fatal and insoluble
- similar and apparently insuperable
- next or greatest
- purely local and native
- real and crucial
- undoubtedly appalling
- last and most exacting
- considerable metrical
- ministerial and financial
- ongoing economic
- rude and insurmountable
- great and almost insurmountable
- numerous and unexpected
- deeper pecuniary
- savage, innumerable
- present unsurmountable
- unpleasant philological
- such insuperable
- apparently insurmountable
- almost insurmountable
- chronic financial
- tively minor
- outstanding philosophical
- corporeal and psychic
- internal or local
- intricate and immeasurable
- many insuperable
- extraordinary and perplexing
- other and fresh
- least matrimonial
- inevitable unforseen
- new and apparently insuperable
- present, fatal
- ever least
- unforseen and unprecedented
- unaccountable and ever new
- extraordinary operational
- journal, much
- present especial
- sudden and almost unprecedented
- grave and cruel
- definite and substantive
- simplified many
- trifling unexpected
- serious exegetical
- serious chronological
- great and almost insuperable
- troublesome pecuniary
- earliest economic
- paris--financial
- asian financial
- agonizing spiritual
- steady and technical
- overwhelming and innumerable
- almost overwhelming and innumerable
- critical or anxious
- anatomical and sartorial
- above-mentioned or other
- unexpected and insuperable
- monstrous and unconquerable
- many methodological
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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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