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 maneuvers

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

  • swift short-range
  • fascinating tactical
  • crazy, female
  • classic aerial
  • unconventional and dangerous
  • intricate preliminary
  • last evasive
  • superficially slight
  • uninteresting military
  • tac-tically disadvantageous
  • daring, flamboyant
  • difficult cooperative
  • wild acrobatic
  • cunning verbal
  • inhumanly difficult
  • startling and entirely unorthodox
  • equally risky
  • leisurely evasive
  • limited atmospheric
  • unorthodox tactical
  • shrewd defensive
  • savage and brilliant
  • underhanded political
  • coolly near-suicidal
  • dancelike offensive
  • flashy and dramatic
  • pathetic monetary
  • refreshing and enjoyable
  • colorful aerial
  • complex flush
  • miraculous high-speed
  • unsuccessful, evasive
  • worst evasive
  • astonishingly deft
  • fly evasive
  • three-week evasive
  • preliminary evasive
  • childish but effective
  • illegal and secret
  • wise tactical
  • raucous verbal
  • risky joint
  • erratic terminal
  • impossible, wrenching
  • showy evasive
  • handy tactical
  • evasive and homing
  • brilliant, last-minute
  • grandiose tactical
  • sleazy political
  • bold but delicate
  • complex topological
  • unorthodox and dangerous
  • tortuous diplomatic
  • entirely unorthodox
  • prodigious and beautiful
  • cautious indirect
  • violent evasive
  • whole abrupt
  • occasional backdoor
  • best evasive
  • capricious, idiosyncratic
  • sleazy back-door
  • sharp, rapid-fire
  • crazy and totally unexpected
  • ritual defensive
  • unavoidably clumsy and slow
  • extraordinary evasive
  • unavoidably clumsy
  • desperate tactical
  • last masterful
  • adroit under-the-table
  • full-scale offensive
  • certain precoital
  • special offensive
  • spectacular aerial
  • canny and merciless
  • successful evasive
  • quick acrobatic
  • quick, surgical
  • forward evasive
  • gentle orbital
  • real-time, real-world
  • other craven
  • single tidy
  • petty cunning
  • intricate, precarious
  • games--annual
  • ill-timed, idiotic
  • seemingly sinister
  • viciously diabolical
  • surprising and seemingly sinister
  • monstrously abrupt
  • political and dishonest
  • popular curative
  • own evasive
  • difficult or impossible
  • desperate evasive
  • remarkable tactical
  • slimy, poisonous

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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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