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 metaphors
Below is a list of describing words for metaphors. 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 metaphors:
- picture--biblical
- oriental picture--biblical
- undeniable and irreducible
- merely exotic
- ubiquitous, specious
- fanciful physical
- singular italian
- nakedly technological
- epigrammatic or delicate
- circumstructural
- immortal parliamentary
- grim, tremendous
- hazy poetical
- perpetual harsh
- unintelligible oriental
- happy and inimitable
- domestic victorian
- confusingly anthropomorphic
- absurd physical
- striking, peculiar
- trivial, happy
- impressively eloquent
- frigid and artificial
- original perceptual
- startlingly apt
- immoderate and unpleasant
- interesting and workable
- harsh and sometimes blasphemous
- pompously academic
- sometimes blasphemous
- overly apt
- same hebraic
- wavy, blurry
- literary sentimental
- appropriate oriental
- fervent, sensuous
- vague culinary
- vague hypothetical
- antiquated physical
- surely incomprehensible
- eminently inappropriate
- remote and precious
- brilliant and exact
- several time-honored
- amusingly inappropriate
- gorgeous and far-fetched
- rationalistic or chemical
- french and legal
- commonplace but useful
- startling and obscure
- milder but misleading
- strong audacious
- uniformly lofty and delicate
- luminous colloquial
- uniformly lofty
- animate, far-fetched
- complimentary or elegant
- direct mythical
- harsh or far-fetched
- fine but paradoxical
- striking and lofty
- usual and sufficiently characteristic
- well-worn physiological
- easy and apt
- fancy or poetical
- baseless and bombastic
- preposterous and strange
- fluent and florid
- common, unimaginative
- extraordinarily harsh
- pointedly suggestive
- admirably worked-out
- new and apt
- curious agricultural
- uncouth, grotesque
- bold oriental
- dangerous, bad
- simplest rural
- pseudo-mathematical
- bizarre human
- magnificently mysterious
- ordinary dramatical
- famous earthy
- immensely larger
- superficial reproductive
- classic therapeutic
- surely biological
- haunting and exotic
- chillingly perfect
- hopelessly trite
- glib, deceitful
- comfortable and pious
- conveniently pious
- trite double
- overtly rude
- colorful human
- perfectly apt and poetic
- visual structural
- apt and poetic
- less botanical
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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