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 statements
Below is a list of describing words for statements. 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 statements:
- proper closest
- cryptic and general
- last, inexplicable
- wild and unprovable
- succinct but perfect
- initial bald
- brave indirect
- compact, logical
- actually accurate
- simple bite-sized
- outrageous but actually accurate
- simultaneously outrageous and vague
- philosophical or even spiritual
- simultaneously outrageous
- frantic and blasphemous
- idiotic and circumstantial
- apparently veracious
- righteously beautiful
- flatly unemotional
- unqualified and positive
- moderate and plain
- condensed and scathing
- cautious, specific
- ancient and vague
- atrocious and false
- additional unsupported
- alarming or disagreeable
- entirely practical and prosaic
- simple, self-confident
- particular, plain
- concise and thorough
- calm, fantastic
- hard numerical
- bare unqualified
- plain frank
- clear and plausible
- clear, unimpassioned
- extravagant contemporary
- foolish or emotional
- preeminently logical
- microscopic declarative
- uncharacteristically bitter
- outlandish and irrational
- seriously outrageous
- successive shallow
- partial or approximate
- loose theological
- carefully misleading
- harsh substantive
- crisply accurate
- incorrect and extraordinary
- punctiliously accurate
- impersonal, unaddressed
- quaint, convincing
- rude or ignorant
- direct thematic
- truthful and yet misleading
- logically adjacent
- blatantly incorrect
- ambivalent public
- profound true
- amazingly contradictory
- bold and callous
- improper and indiscreet
- especially mindless
- sometimes combative
- earlier brash
- slanderous or libelous
- well-nigh unbelievable
- unconventional but original
- approximately exhaustive
- serious and acute
- illuminating and beautiful
- human and incomplete
- admirably clear and concise
- absurd contradictory
- extraordinary and suspicious
- apparently sincere and trustworthy
- lucid, scientific
- philosophic and adequate
- frank but natural
- short or general
- calm, continuous
- basic and pivotal
- materially false
- deliberate expository
- brief and provisional
- corrupt false
- new, sensational
- finest abstract
- single coy
- fine, explicit
- veracious and satisfactory
- vaguely pessimistic
- remarkably fresh and candid
- senselessly false
- single ignorant
- environmental-impact
- profound, philosophical
- extremely convoluted
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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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