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 discourse
Below is a list of describing words for discourse. 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 discourse:
- excellent dumb
- extraordinary noble
- long and most passionate
- pasty and brave
- frothy, vain
- well-prepared and protracted
- voluble and sharp
- fat, abundant
- informal indirect
- seemingly impassioned
- low and seemingly impassioned
- lengthy and ingenious
- ingenious and solid
- aquatic and musical
- impromptu, fanciful
- passionate, humorous
- flippant, vain
- profound and edifying
- great catechistical
- much frivolous
- able and sublime
- useful instructive
- excellent merry
- sweetest and most amorous
- large and fluent
- able doctrinal
- grave and truly solemn
- short but serious
- malignant and obscene
- together short
- ridiculous academic
- rarified theological
- pointless, divisive
- shamelessly seditious
- lengthy pedantic
- important introductory
- troublesome, precise
- semi-theosophical
- astounding and outrageous
- infinite joyous
- genteel, unaffected
- comprehensive preliminary
- sweet and long
- serious and moderate
- private and loving
- artless, animated
- trifling or playful
- lengthy and voluble
- silly oral
- long and profoundly pessimistic
- long and most suggestive
- pleasing witty
- judicious, masculine
- pious or profitable
- confident and strange
- extraordinary and somewhat loud
- adroit introductory
- witty and pleasant
- pleasant and amorous
- much privy
- overly emphatic
- sweeter thy
- unclear or evasive
- heartbreaking, elegiac
- vain, frothy
- eloquent and virtuous
- general and uninteresting
- sensible academic
- common or scholastical
- ever sweet and gentle
- conciliatory and obsequious
- virtuous memorial
- atheistical and immoral
- judicious and alarming
- present errant
- pleasant and eloquent
- second centennial
- crisp, emphatic and powerful
- emphatic and powerful
- balanced technical
- merry and even loose
- pious and free
- short complimental
- didactic or unimpassioned
- strange inaugural
- eloquent, pathetic
- intensely proper
- politic simple
- desperate and most criminal
- sedate and prosaic
- practical and highly imaginative
- fervent but jerky
- long and somewhat supercilious
- brief and very good
- sorrowful and profound
- solemn and worshipful
- partly indirect
- astrological and theological
- free and facetious
- eloquent religious
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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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