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 severity
Below is a list of describing words for severity. 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 severity:
- rigid and morose
- gloomy and relentless
- well-known ruthless
- sledge-parties--unusual
- editorial or critical
- ol mock
- greatest and most degrading
- critical and caustic
- prevalent seeming
- pitiless, murderous
- impersonal, rigid
- harshest and most horrible
- unnecessary and ill-timed
- harsh or injurious
- habitual magisterial
- uncompromising, degrading
- cold but ruthless
- singular financial
- extreme and unjust
- almost draconian
- undue or unnecessary
- harsh and ostentatious
- extreme and often unjust
- harsh and morbid
- admittedly unprecedented
- last and unusual
- truly puritanical
- contrary, harsh
- permanent bone-deep
- sharp, sudden and lightning-like
- fearful but necessary
- tremendous and indiscriminating
- personal and contemptuous
- harsh but necessary
- customary canadian
- much and improper
- merciless and irreverent
- rude and plain-spoken
- somewhat unjustifiable
- over-zeal and somewhat unjustifiable
- almost stonelike
- surely undue
- unflinching and terrific
- less pitiless
- manifest inquisitorial
- mock parental
- lazy official
- quiet, splendid
- correct and strict
- almost purgatorial
- customary turkish
- extreme and various
- rough and impetuous
- often merciless
- divinely mild
- bold, greater
- strict and noble
- somber official
- stern unquestioned
- excessive and progressive
- deep-eyed, thin-lipped
- probably requisite
- fancy and classical
- lofty forensic
- unreasoning and perverse
- intense and often intolerable
- relative climatic
- aside royal
- pitiless and tremendous
- strict virginal
- peculiar and classic
- alarming and even fatal
- considerable or great
- terrifying and even repellent
- necessary but dire
- sudden and mock
- hypocritical and cruel
- useless and unreasonable
- equally ill-timed
- rigorous and uncompromising
- great or unnecessary
- customary mild
- implacable religious
- preposterous and cruel
- little exemplary
- sudden prim
- pleasant, rugged
- black, elegant
- ancient and apocalyptic
- deliberate legal
- sudden and lightning-like
- inhuman and unprecedented
- extreme and wanton
- unreasonable or unjust
- iniquitous and shocking
- excessive clerical
- conventional and inconsistent
- rough and untamed
- ready and unscrupulous
- former necessary
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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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