Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 scrutiny

Below is a list of describing words for scrutiny. 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 scrutiny:

  • long and very deliberate
  • fifth soulful
  • keen, loving
  • interested and suspicious
  • polite transient
  • careful imperial
  • careful remote
  • democratic and competitive
  • silent, disturbing
  • resolute and affectionate
  • intense journalistic
  • swift anxious
  • proper skeptical
  • passionate and relentless
  • invidious and inquisitorial
  • new, inquisitive
  • keen or hostile
  • keen but loving
  • brilliant hard
  • silent and keen
  • closest and most eager
  • frank, bemused
  • steady, whimsical
  • hard bold
  • distinctly rigid
  • strict but not unfair
  • penetrating and almost severe
  • gentle, vulgar
  • proper or conscientious
  • unwittingly unjust
  • jealous and uncompromising
  • strict, jealous and uncompromising
  • microscopic feminine
  • stern and keen
  • sharp but not unkind
  • rigid and jealous
  • vigilant and careful
  • skeptical medical
  • silent constant
  • a\-tional
  • black-eyed, shrewd
  • severe and careful
  • brief and penetrating
  • perpetual microscopic
  • furtive, sullen
  • reluctant and very perfunctory
  • rapid and shrewd
  • sharp and silent
  • frequent perceptual
  • keen and direct
  • unrelenting and perhaps unnatural
  • careful, months-long
  • singular, breathless
  • quick, humble
  • affectionate and proud
  • strenuous faithful
  • fond but keen
  • queer contemplative
  • narrowest and most jealous
  • deliberately insolent
  • sharp, selfish
  • keenest good-natured
  • rigid or grudging
  • constant and comprehensive
  • curious but entirely respectful
  • inventive and hazardous
  • grim and practised
  • careful, poring
  • exact and dangerous
  • partly shrewd
  • calm, frigid
  • critical and rather hostile
  • unflinching, impertinent
  • suspicious and lengthy
  • congressional nor presidential
  • exacting judicial
  • almost skilful
  • exclusive or permanent
  • rigorous and unbiased
  • sour, keen
  • intense and interested
  • exacting and sceptical
  • apparently severest
  • slightest unbiased
  • gravest and sharpest
  • exact and jealous
  • ultimate and honest
  • inquiring and suspicious
  • frank but cheerful
  • horrible impassive
  • exact telescopic
  • keen and frank
  • watchful, stealthy
  • exceptionally rigorous
  • deliberate frank
  • intense and comparative
  • careful and contemptuous
  • silent and inquisitorial
  • frank and careful
  • mutual sharp

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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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