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 instance
Below is a list of describing words for instance. 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 instance:
- sole, sad
- remarkable and well-established
- more sounder
- nearest and most topical
- wholly unsubstantial
- popular but unworthy
- grievous and vexatious
- sarcastic parallel
- obvious and rather banal
- astounding and gratifying
- notorious and decisive
- monstrously palpable
- recent benevolent
- flagrant and remarkable
- designedly ludicrous
- last wholesome
- romantic, generous
- singular and very rare
- eminent and awful
- ordinarily flagrant
- particular and very curious
- permanent and efficacious
- strict and special
- single unanalyzed
- instructive negative
- sure analogous
- best-known shakespearian
- flattest and most trifling
- rare and instructive
- true fervent
- quite ordinary and proper
- best and almost perfect
- perplexing and astounding
- infamous and revolting
- particular and excessive
- early graphic
- familiar recent
- supremely quaint
- trivial but instructive
- greater or stronger
- tremendous and significant
- last and most alarming
- memorable and gratifying
- instructive and striking
- typical and sufficiently striking
- utterly shameful
- terrible and utterly shameful
- signal and scandalous
- poor illustrative
- familiar minor
- solitary but refreshing
- later contrary
- fresh and sad
- specific and convincing
- best and most crucial
- prominent typical
- strong and indelible
- late and remarkable
- solitary biblical
- curious and very illustrative
- remarkable but not uncommon
- similar and very remarkable
- notable and picturesque
- solitary and accidental
- gallant individual
- unquestionable and everywhere visible
- wholly typical
- clear and wholly typical
- memorable foreign
- exceptionably favorable
- extreme and daring
- remarkable and perhaps unique
- amusing and quite characteristic
- instructive modern
- new and most flattering
- strongest and most grateful
- former and irrevocable
- concrete lyric
- remotely analogous
- modern and profitable
- single and phenomenal
- extremely unscientific and inefficient
- less odd
- notable and even graver
- extreme and curious
- recent and memorable
- conspicuous and unquestionable
- typical and extremely instructive
- greatest and most awful
- brisk and laudable
- clearest and strangest
- sufficiently grotesque and imperfect
- illustrious and striking
- glaring and notorious
- shocking heart-rending
- finer late
- remarkable and almost solitary
- dark and memorable
- beautiful concrete
- well-known late
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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