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 operations
Below is a list of describing words for operations. 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 operations:
- literary caesarean
- other peacekeeping
- whole routine
- iraqi special
- unfamiliar culinary
- patently unauthorized
- grand and daring
- minor and inconclusive
- routine mathematical
- probably subconscious
- subtle and probably subconscious
- vast coal-mining
- single three-day
- clandestine, personal
- paramathematical
- mysterious dental
- several followup
- fatal surgical
- resultant surgical
- nice profitable
- recondite and most complex
- necessary but most delicate
- admirable and intricate
- inordinately difficult
- long-term continuous
- many hydrological
- crisp and easy
- standard mobile
- difficult unpleasant
- diversified and important
- watchful and auxiliary
- inscrutable thy
- practical and unlimited
- general infinitesimal
- big clean-up
- politico-sentimental
- naval tactical
- large space-based
- normal ecological
- indirect negative
- infinitesimal and human
- general and almost constant
- [_naval
- gradual and perhaps unobserved
- definite inverse
- perhaps unobserved
- sickeningly painful
- long-term, iffy
- unrestrained and free
- indirect and consequential
- extraordinary surgical
- dangerous surgical
- difficult surgical
- state-of-the-art special
- essentially nineteenth-century
- kindred special
- pure kindred
- zany, marginal
- original kindred
- extremely cautious and slow
- initial clandestine
- remote and rapid
- marvelously skillful
- special clandestine
- long and marvelously skillful
- glandular and neural
- infinitely riskier
- disgusting minor
- often transparent
- conceivable surgical
- abdominal gynæcological
- tardy, ineffectual
- small in-office
- whole preventative
- half-baked and slipshod
- defective or injurious
- painful surgical
- one-man and automatic
- joint peacekeeping
- single intensive
- regular black-market
- tranquil and purely pleasurable
- greatest amphibious
- belligerent maritime
- regular chemical
- entire logical
- successful hit-and-run
- whole farcical
- personally direct
- uninteresting but practical
- higher hierarchical
- skillful military
- ingenious but lengthy
- recent corrective
- old ineffectual
- elementary and vital
- excruciating surgical
- painstaking and bruising
- speedier and bolder
- tricky and definitely dangerous
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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