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 improvements
Below is a list of describing words for improvements. 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 improvements:
- recent substantial
- perfectly rational and feasible
- subtle defensive
- exterior and structural
- slight but measurable
- sure incremental
- great and reciprocally beneficial
- rational and feasible
- scientific and hygienic
- public internal
- merely--internal
- evident and valuable
- least cosmetic
- rapid and various
- sometimes marvelous
- educational and internal
- steady and often dramatic
- current short-term
- big internal
- mandatory strategic
- great and most satisfactory
- former and material
- mutual literary
- vigorous and radical
- moral and agricultural
- scientific, moral and agricultural
- reciprocally beneficial
- rapid and solid
- steady technological
- vast telescopic
- backwards wonderful
- other, incremental
- laborious manurial
- interim, public
- moral or non-material
- industrious and profitable
- particular further
- merely eugenic
- further and permanent
- optional and gradual
- moral, intellectual and political
- useful economical
- gradual but very perceptible
- seldom distinct
- continual unbounded
- large sure
- artistical and political
- minor labor-saving
- social, artistical and political
- always slow and dubious
- successive and additional
- vast and inevitable
- probable or imaginary
- important life-saving
- distinct, effectual
- important and noticeable
- selfish or temporary
- much sanitary
- positive and durable
- valuable permanent
- loose technical
- national internal
- constantly scheming
- immediate and marvelous
- amazing and rapid
- gradual and perceptible
- apply recent
- moral, social and material
- background--internal
- consistent social
- useful and even important
- highest and most essential
- permanent or valuable
- inexpensive but highly desirable
- wholesale modern
- circumscribed further
- striking internal
- stark, blatant
- numerous and very important
- effectual or immediate
- rapidly innumerable
- next and most valuable
- party--internal
- systematic, conscientious
- universal and advantageous
- circumscribed, measurable
- few onconsequential
- enormous all-round
- easily practicable
- well-nigh immeasurable
- necessary humanitarian
- constant and swift
- forth technical
- gratifying and widespread
- great, essential
- ~~gradual
- extensive rapid-transit
- rapid synthetic
- latest feudal
- partial but perceptible
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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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