Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 extensions

Below is a list of describing words for extensions. 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 extensions:

  • incessant circular
  • abstract nor visible
  • reckless or indiscriminate
  • laudable and fascinating
  • intolerable and useless
  • local or spatial
  • temporary flexible
  • powerful and obedient
  • one-year free
  • bright, wood-paneled
  • metal mobile
  • indefinite southern
  • countless neural
  • lateral southern
  • posterior triangular
  • tubular, posterolateral
  • --gradual and irresistible
  • former greater
  • limitless dimensional
  • rakish stern
  • further and formidable
  • bizarre, macabre
  • radical and most important
  • abrupt and tremendous
  • briefly necessary
  • namely unlimited
  • determinate, limited
  • needless and confusing
  • considerable spatio-temporal
  • prodigious and world-wide
  • western and final
  • thick posterior
  • programme--gradual
  • external or local
  • actual or local
  • connatural external
  • narrow and natural
  • finite temporal
  • ignominious horizontal
  • invariable determinate
  • hence heterogeneous
  • tangible nor visible
  • unalterable spacial
  • relative spacial
  • absolute and sensible
  • maximum downward
  • many somatic
  • direct, spontaneous
  • pparently superfluous
  • arbitrary postwar
  • unsuspected dimensional
  • physically incarnate
  • slight transeptal
  • weird ectoplasmic
  • innumerable episodic
  • quick three-digit
  • fanciful and speculative
  • indefinite but short
  • entirely illegitimate
  • greater previous
  • passive and extreme
  • rapid and mighty
  • slowly passive and extreme
  • inconceivably rapid and mighty
  • slowly passive
  • judicious and reasonable
  • possible indoor
  • safe and full
  • uninteresting white
  • pacific and effective
  • lately considerable
  • humane, pacific and effective
  • physically mere
  • wastefully rapid
  • cummin--traditional
  • properly denominational
  • l-shaped polar
  • simply lineal
  • mere vibratory
  • probably wide
  • rapid consequent
  • illegitimately wide
  • faintest outlying
  • vascular, muscular and glandular
  • vast and almost immediate
  • indefinite and immediate
  • faint or barely distinguishable
  • almost indefinite and immediate
  • broad pleural
  • extribal
  • triangular pleural
  • erratic northern
  • steadfast and hearty
  • two-story rear
  • present cosmopolitan
  • lanky, unnatural
  • final secondary
  • admissible national
  • indefinite artificial
  • minimum chromatic

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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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