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 manners
Below is a list of describing words for manners. 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 manners:
- dullest insipid
- corrupt good
- positive and dogmatical
- candid charismatic
- unhurried, quiet
- annoyingly indifferent
- best barbarous
- snotty, superior
- surprising and astonishing
- catlike good
- warm sincere
- proud but sombre
- stately metaphorical
- native and ancestral
- lucid and agreeable
- disgraceful and unbridled
- businesslike and satisfying
- free and straightforward
- poetical and mild
- pleasing, familiar
- dangerously casual
- responsible and prudent
- cordial and unsentimental
- peculiar and fitting
- cool and very eloquent
- unbearable bad
- small and clumsy
- erratic and pitiful
- timid and almost awkward
- purposeful and meaningful
- casual and unintentional
- slow, stay-at-home
- olden merry
- perfectly unassuming and gentle
- correct but perfectly expressionless
- perfectly easy and graceful
- unusually rapid and delightful
- subtle but compelling
- calm, low-key
- sweetest and most cordial
- awkward but comical
- handsome and submissive
- sympathetic and inefficient
- unmistakably possessive
- meaningless and idiotic
- inspiring official
- cursory and imperfect
- frank debonair
- boyish insolent
- delightfully frank and outspoken
- worst, bad
- atrocious human
- atrocious bad
- pleasant and trusting
- fully animate
- no-nonsense, business-like
- cavalier and disinterested
- earthly feminine
- predictable or reliable
- intimate and complex
- warm continental
- gay, gracious
- similarly gorgeous
- simplest and most agreeable
- peaceful, reasonable and honorable
- decorous or decent
- practical and fascinating
- well-bred, easy
- superficially normal
- italian, graceful
- devious and effective
- stiff, regular
- thought-experimental
- extraordinary, equivocal
- usual obliging
- quick, telltale
- generally fair and impartial
- deliberately offhand
- open, appealing
- efficient, professional
- secret and clandestine
- offhand, unimportant
- efficient criminal
- usual authoritarian
- decidedly paternal
- characteristic forthright
- decisive professorial
- surreptitious and eccentric
- mournful, terrifying
- absurd pompous
- dutiful and constitutional
- courteous, autocratic
- tentative and almost apologetic
- insulting, ironical
- more sharper
- fierce but adroit
- mild, merry
- grudging and almost contemptuous
- shy and lumpish
- skilful and instructive
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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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