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 examples
Below is a list of describing words for examples. 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 examples:
- ridiculous, fine
- particularly astounding
- rather intense and effective
- reasonably aesthetic
- unfairly horrible
- exceptional and most remarkable
- italian and recent
- excellent or very good
- endless modern
- garish and unsettling
- particularly garish and unsettling
- unexpected and salutary
- ready and conspicuous
- several moribund
- last and most dramatic
- historic recital
- great and opportune
- remarkable, exciting and unique
- perfect and very rich
- exciting and unique
- rarer thy
- rhetorical, logical
- scandal or bad
- cruel and rare
- enough grave
- foreign and scholastic
- typical puzzling
- clearest such
- mathematically tidy
- more screechy
- quaint and very new
- shameful and mischievous
- recent and fatal
- ethical and dramatic
- suggestively curious
- recent, dramatic
- latest outstanding
- least bizarre
- current conspicuous
- indeed edifying
- queer and amusing
- zeal and comfortable
- fruitful and brilliant
- interesting elementary
- wholesome and profound
- special conspicuous
- single, convincing
- extant palestinian
- vicious and blood-thirsty
- literal and rhythmic
- interesting typical
- magnificently obscene
- consistent pious
- glorious and merciful
- strangest and noblest
- merciful and meek
- scandal nor bad
- certain and very ancient
- own contagious
- perfect mundane
- bright but too rare
- rude but sensible
- cruel and memorable
- evil and most pernicious
- striking and salutary
- perhaps righteous
- stern and perhaps righteous
- present prominent
- illustrious and immortal
- prominent and closest
- marvelously elegant
- best, succinct
- ironic or most ridiculous
- subtle and most ambiguous
- immediate and horrifying
- finest and most extreme
- fine fictional
- bewilderingly clever
- good, verifiable
- surprising and even startling
- fairly arrogant
- great or obvious
- meaningless and flashy
- specially awful
- beautifully logical
- dynamic and typical
- awful and healthy
- contrary, characteristic
- specially ridiculous
- finest or most curious
- hackneyed historic
- unique continental
- particularly fine and concrete
- multiply classical
- fine and concrete
- neat but grotesque
- refreshing and healthy
- certainly typical
- silent continuous
- multiply dismal
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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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