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 structures
Below is a list of describing words for structures. 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 structures:
- curved wedge-shaped
- perfect consistent
- anomalous internal
- miniature translucent
- delicately unstable
- frayed mechanical
- unthinkably deeper
- broader capital
- sturdy, domed
- facial bony
- administrative and technological
- vast rectilinear
- fundamental, granular
- fragile, ephemeral
- entire derivative
- lunar scientific
- plain, pyramidal
- top-heavy, asymmetrical
- distant pyramidal
- economic administrative
- roughly pyramidal
- flat, windowless
- amazingly huge and complex
- occasional and rudimentary
- plain, antique
- various embryological
- slight, impudent
- distinct one-story
- similar anatomical
- antiquated financial
- underground archival
- huge canonical
- interior genetic
- finest molecular
- airy gothic
- purely epical
- oblong massive
- your physical
- appropriate tubular
- tall, tetrahedral
- innumerable faceless
- entire cellular
- more featureless
- pyramidal, windowless
- unescapably wrong
- coherent larger
- demandingly formal
- internal crystalline
- five-story underground
- conical underground
- similar but simple
- sacred and magnificent
- metal fortress-like
- normal protoplasmic
- primally ancient
- viable colonial
- strongest governmental
- strong, venerable
- gaunt, two-story
- crystalline domed
- simple, rigid
- recent, simpler
- efficient and massive
- orthodox and innocent
- rigid and fragile
- glamorously high-tech
- beautiful steadfast
- decrepit but oddly elegant
- squat, colossal
- vast, frosty
- far-flung and chaotic
- beautiful and most anomalous
- ignoble, bony
- deformed, obscene
- archetypal public
- strongest, stiffest
- immense and convoluted
- seemingly circular
- orange, pyramidal
- true veined
- tubular internal
- intricate muscular
- magnificent analytical
- oldest unified
- metal skeletal
- supportive tribal
- lower-class social
- short enigmatic
- incredibly artificial
- angular spidery
- intimidatingly inhuman
- drab five-story
- vast and intimidatingly inhuman
- past complex
- jagged, frothy
- low and disorganized
- tan wooden
- distinctive grammatical
- dark and inert
- skillful complex
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
