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 schemes
Below is a list of describing words for schemes. 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 schemes:
- forward great and good
- diabolical genetic
- rather utopian
- strange and altogether antique
- new money-making
- vast philanthropic
- infernal and unheard-of
- madly murderous
- deep, malicious
- forward great
- crazy missionary
- intricate and crazy
- half-baked, impulsive
- new and possibly unreliable
- sordid, bold
- ingenious and entirely successful
- still wider and deeper
- planetary and personal
- brilliant but sinful
- lithuanian and hungarian
- secret but most comprehensive
- perpetual and almost unassisted
- altogether antique
- foolhardy, desperate
- plausible or possible
- baroque and convoluted
- complex and outrageous
- equally baroque and convoluted
- still methodical
- equally baroque
- argentine canal
- perfidious and horrible
- extensive but desultory
- huge chimerical
- miserable and criminal
- extensive concerted
- algebraically certain
- best-laid
- crazy, long-term
- desperate, half-witted
- idiotic philanthropic
- further impracticable
- low-class little
- grand and mischievous
- wild and inadvisable
- extremely difficult and romantic
- difficult and romantic
- wildly unscientific
- original canal
- forward wild
- mad, grandiose
- mad, nonsensical
- new grandiose
- great abortive
- traditional broadside
- terrible and outrageous
- possibly unreliable
- clever, wild
- crazy utopian
- grand and secret
- admirably ripe and fruity
- brokered corrupt
- ripe and fruity
- bold moneymaking
- admirably ripe
- strange, destructive
- whole imperfect
- international canal
- grand systematic
- finest and most rational
- conceivably practical
- abortive and equivocal
- simple elastic
- violent and undigested
- unaccountable and diabolical
- wild, violent and undigested
- admirable presidential
- especially concerted
- uncommonly daring and clever
- grand but utterly impracticable
- new and shrewd
- montreal various
- daring, delightful
- brilliant predatory
- wholesale murderous
- wholesale materialistic
- dark but pleasant
- deep, international
- considerable and effectual
- stiff, festal
- well-developed predatory
- latter-day industrial
- deep and very profitable
- latest unfeasible
- desperate and unjustifiable
- wonderfully thought-out
- restful decorative
- simple, foolproof
- broad and energetic
- grand thaumaturgical
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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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