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 functions
Below is a list of describing words for functions. 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 functions:
- civilian administrative
- official and ceremonial
- highest robotic
- routine, supervisory
- proper metabolic
- fundamental ecological
- sole and piteously humble
- intrinsic utilitarian
- homogeneous quadratic
- doubly periodic
- glandular and circulatory
- imperfect and delicate
- higher neural
- merely reproductive
- personal, various
- deranged spiritual
- rational and integral
- purely spiritual and supernatural
- differentiable
- limited managerial
- slightly computerized
- symbiotic ecological
- completely natural and necessary
- arduous and high
- important archival
- digestive and nutritive
- ofaffectual
- ample but anomalous
- last graphical
- perpetual, ample but anomalous
- noble and quite legitimate
- basically juvenile
- rational symmetrical
- normal excretory
- necessary and respective
- necessary episcopal
- crucial psychic
- torpid physical
- new, necessary
- absolutely definite and specific
- trivial and outmoded
- purely supernatural or spiritual
- total cranial
- judicial and regulatory
- racial biological
- quasi-judicial and broadly advisory
- apparently mundane
- broadly advisory
- important but apparently mundane
- crucial civic
- piteously humble
- wonderfully complex and difficult
- rational integral
- private physiological
- assorted extra
- basic societal
- whole vegetative
- earliest, simplest
- definite purposeful
- minor renal
- large-scale aggressive
- synthetic perceptual
- operational and logistic
- beneficial, necessary
- unimpaired and unimpeded
- own cortical
- strongly inherent
- upper cognitive
- superb but rather dull
- natural trigonometrical
- peculiar aboriginal
- administrative and quasi-judicial
- difficult or uncommon
- peaceful avuncular
- universal sacerdotal
- certain quasi-judicial
- exalted and most diverse
- also exponential
- therefore rational and integral
- therefore rational
- inverse trigonometrical
- important and eternally distinct
- unfashionable, formal
- important dermal
- atavistic and rudimentary
- stupendous royal
- complex variable
- secret and diplomatic
- separate biochemical
- appellate judicial
- primal physical
- divine or magical
- latent secondary
- autonomous and discretionary
- mechanical psychological
- sit-down social
- new, supplemental
- inexplicable higher
- irritating but harmless
- other non-essential
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.
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