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 enquiries
Below is a list of describing words for enquiries. 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 enquiries:
- mature and secondary
- further impertinent
- delicate, unobtrusive
- already muffled
- confidential statistical
- mature and thorough
- regular rational
- polite african
- perpetual and indiscreet
- endless teasing
- further and exhaustive
- many and laborious
- preliminary and magisterial
- kindly welcome and many
- closest secret
- cordially interested
- preliminary and inferior
- meteoric or subterranean
- distant and high
- perhaps fruitless
- well-mannered and tentative
- few one-sided
- extremely delicate and confidential
- usual rigorous
- unprofitable and dangerous
- suspicious and disagreeable
- secret, fascinating
- restless and curious
- parliamentary and judicial
- special and precise
- direct and pertinent
- certain artless
- many philological
- preliminary routine
- urgent ongoing
- ‘psychological
- numerous and conscientious
- several discreet
- religious or historical
- however modern
- medical and philosophical
- forth countless
- few discreet
- own, separate
- rigidly accurate
- eager and rapid
- necessary routine
- general metaphysical
- welcome and many
- many supplementary
- modern metaphysical
- few breathless
- kindly welcome
- gravely courteous
- many rigid
- recent astronomical
- sweet and courteous
- few formal
- discreet private
- few tactful
- diligent and careful
- many fruitless
- few hesitant
- difficult and laborious
- few brief
- delicate and confidential
- ordinary judicial
- several ineffectual
- such presumptuous
- many indirect
- numerous recent
- such speculative
- present, such
- few previous
- often fruitless
- further specific
- several anxious
- serious and painful
- curious and subtle
- many anxious
- rather unwelcome
- few tentative
- few cautious
- few civil
- merely curious
- few hasty
- few good-natured
- several fruitless
- few perfunctory
- such affectionate
- few faint
- less ingenious
- more careless
- necessary preliminary
- less urgent
- discreet
- door-to-door
- such preliminary
- few preliminary
- highly confidential
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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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