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 explorations
Below is a list of describing words for explorations. 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 explorations:
- further subterranean
- whole ill-advised
- further deep-space
- theoretical and empirical
- free-wheeling intellectual
- further subglacial
- systematic european
- premature and useless
- dismal and perplexed
- fortuitous or systematic
- unconscious and nervous
- exciting and hazardous
- joint secret
- earliest careful
- lonely local
- fitful and lengthy
- east and complete
- preliminary african
- careful, selective
- solitary reverent
- aborted further
- famous and most useful
- occasional on-line
- valuable and very extensive
- strictly tactile
- queer, unscientific
- trusting, unhurried
- indisputable spanish
- secret coal-mining
- further tentative
- seductive, erotic
- bold and highly instructive
- endless and erotic
- individual and careful
- leisurely manned
- vexing and expensive
- rhinoscopical
- closest rhinoscopical
- cent-per-central african
- unbroken and venturesome
- sane and quantitative
- habitual abdominal
- extensive and methodical
- forward african
- arduous and personal
- little archeological
- supercilious and impertinent
- continually risky
- profitable intellectual
- particularly lyrical
- complete tibetan
- farther geological
- closer and intelligent
- zealous monkish
- trial and persistent
- further temporal
- unmanned scientific
- noteworthy western
- lunar and interplanetary
- curious and careful
- unmanned planetary
- pertinent theoretical
- luscious and thorough
- latest deep-sea
- sen�sual
- complex and unsettling
- lucrative galactic
- litical and class-based
- early robotic
- wonderful and perilous
- good, easy-to-read
- remarkable solitary
- haphazard physical
- asiatic zoological
- lofty and intriguing
- prosperous, new
- wide-eyed sexual
- remarkable and heroic
- slow, noncommittal
- necessarily tentative
- extravagant brazen
- thorough final
- achingly thorough
- hungry, urgent
- chilly underwater
- further galactic
- intimate and protracted
- deep-space hostile
- unabashedly enthusiastic
- perilous planetary
- disturbing and poignant
- three-man lunar
- seductive and thorough
- oddly devotional
- poetic and esoteric
- little tactile
- little chestal
- long, improvisational
- immediate left-handed
- sterile or cold
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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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