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 queries
Below is a list of describing words for queries. 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 queries:
- latest urgent
- gloomy, uninterested
- necessary discreet
- few unsubtle
- hesitant mental
- similar but trivial
- penetrating practical
- next lazy
- meek, tentative
- silent and suspicious
- impotent, dumb
- _entomological
- natural but most impertinent
- practical photographic
- more printable
- soft but razor-edged
- aside anxious
- necessarily futile
- livelier, hotter
- good, specific
- serious, theological and legal
- direct and embarrassing
- other jocose
- suave and stereotyped
- --glossarial
- inconvenient and impossible
- _glossarial
- abrupt and emphatic
- dangerous and obscene
- legitimate and even inevitable
- desultory mental
- sharp, responsive
- nervous, point-blank
- unnecessarily polite
- frivolous or petty
- mutely anxious
- idle, unanswerable
- heartlessly selfish
- direct pertinent
- important photographic
- keen introspective
- surprising final
- badly outworn
- singular, appealing
- usually religious or literary
- indignant and oft-repeated
- abundant official
- same vindictive
- difficult or doubtful
- lazy mental
- vulgar and intimate
- private, informal
- awake, uncertain
- idle conversational
- spiked further
- piercingly salient
- crisp, inquisitorial
- single and piercingly salient
- such tenebrous
- kagal
- invariably stilted
- scientific or diplomatic
- invariably stilted and terse
- pleasing and suggestive
- deceptively naive
- indecipherable telepathic
- sufficiently courteous and respectful
- stark, terrifying
- formal preliminary
- past, insensitive
- irrelevant and impersonal
- noticeably off-beat
- apparently irrelevant and impersonal
- sly strange
- initial aural
- partially intuitive
- old inexplicable
- general and stereotyped
- fair, plain
- especially ridiculous
- former unspoken
- next condescending
- plain medical
- oft-repeated masculine
- frequent but unsatisfactory
- simple and exceedingly conventional
- apparently unwarrantable
- sudden, anxious
- hard materialistic
- hopeful, hopeless
- late unwelcome
- cool sardonic
- little nonverbal
- sudden and irrelevant
- real nautical
- simple and astounding
- sudden sarcastic
- few oblique
- strictly routine
- casual and unimportant
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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