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 formulas
Below is a list of describing words for formulas. 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 formulas:
- long-successful economic
- complex empirical
- series--general
- pseudomathematical
- new power-sharing
- often ambiguous and elastic
- oft-repeated dual
- comprehensive but barbarous
- recondite algebraic
- barren republican
- strict complex
- insidious and irreverent
- supposedly sure
- unique analgesic
- seductive modal
- same dental
- beloved psychohistorical
- meaner democratic
- stolid and conventional
- apply precise
- concise mathematical
- secret exclusive
- beloved mathematical
- rational approximate
- coherent and possible
- magical therapeutic
- steadfast and sufficient
- dangerous and barren
- oldest basic
- explicit differential
- pat academic
- concise, imperative
- bloodless and philosophical
- universal algebraic
- triply triple
- ancient confessional
- prismoidal
- vague polite
- mexican baptismal
- ancient rhythmical
- inane and empty
- city-bred medical
- ancient and wonder-working
- professedly moderate
- poetical, quaint
- somewhat liturgical
- simplest enigmatical
- short algebraic
- active and exhaustive
- different and apparently degraded
- mechanical or intellectual
- classic newtonian
- absurd hypnotic
- exact magical
- neat, portable
- admirable republican
- certain semi-magical
- six-common-mineral
- few--contrapuntal
- mystic and unquestioned
- wise and somewhat timid
- general blank
- crabbed and abstract
- absolute, decisive
- moral and disciplinary
- cooperative inclusive
- briefest and most usual
- competitive, divisive
- little contrapuntal
- external, phonetic
- abstract immovable
- complete and generally comprehensive
- condensed general
- mystic and perishable
- precise and lucid
- traditional and arbitrary
- authoritative or mandatory
- specifically celtic
- expressive and pregnant
- silly algebraic
- visible symbolic
- new, polite
- old and choicest
- comprehensive journalistic
- architectonic and symmetric
- chloropal
- well-known algebraic
- narrowly romantic
- trigometrical
- abstract and compact
- thickest quilted
- vulgar but precise
- blended or composite
- loud monotone
- empty and high-sounding
- extremely scientific and accurate
- abstract and accurate
- correct and primary
- simplest doctrinal
- comprehensive, scientific
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
