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 methods
Below is a list of describing words for methods. 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 methods:
- equally streamlined
- efficient lunar
- ancient, wasteful
- absolute safe
- various generalized
- secret, unclean
- harmful, unsure
- crudely definite
- time-tested and supposedly foolproof
- old harsher
- ancient, reputable
- gruesomely old-fashioned
- foolproof, unambiguous
- indestructible and unambiguous
- antiquated and wasteful
- timeworn and ineffectual
- inverse deductive
- decently satisfactory
- old operational
- rational deductive
- fairly terminal
- other daft
- stern logistical
- obvious and effectual
- experimental and dangerous
- easiest direct
- other unsure
- fair, cheap and easy
- so-called northeastern
- trial, tentative
- accurate and only practicable
- slowest biological
- clumsy and inaccurate
- lucid pedagogical
- superior and diabolical
- direct, military
- secret and decent
- indirect and unsuspected
- cheap, practical
- vicious administrative
- extraordinarly cheap
- modern and most successful
- easiest and most usual
- direct descriptive
- infallible scientific
- oldest and most rudimentary
- better revival
- gentler and wiser
- regular statistical
- modern classificatory
- military organizational
- direct deductive
- diabolical intuitive
- obvious and expeditious
- unorthodox and socially heinous
- inverse, deductive
- socially heinous
- simple or asexual
- deductive and partly experimental
- deductive mathematical
- partly experimental
- ordinary and inaccurate
- disciplinary and meditative
- common electoral
- substantial, reflective
- preferred gentle
- ordinary electoral
- standard procedural
- national statistical
- completely non-invasive
- vulgar or deceptive
- haphazard hereditary
- reasonably painless
- concise synthetic
- european--policial
- old, circumstantial
- democratic and plebeian
- singular and effective
- effectual and coercive
- desperate but effectual
- exquisite and effectual
- quick and inconspicuous
- unusually unsavory
- true and very traditional
- latest and most practical
- dangerous and incorrect
- special navigational
- intuitive, emotional
- semi-colloquial
- harmless and painless
- aimless and haphazard
- perfectly harmless and painless
- shiftless modern
- inadequate, incompetent
- rapid, rough and ready
- exact pedestrian
- regular and most efficient
- vile, ambiguous
- direct and desperate
- simple and successful
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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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