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 symptom
Below is a list of describing words for symptom. 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 symptom:
- new and most perplexing
- habitual dyspeptic
- prominent psychical
- equally strong and general
- fallacious good
- last unnatural
- least fearful
- exceedingly weird and awful
- final and usual
- frank psychotic
- single premonitory
- prominent and grave
- constant and significant
- individual neurotic
- sexual toxic
- diseased and very general
- truly debilitating
- individual, outer
- last and formidable
- further and unmistakable
- well-known initial
- cunning, invariable
- common but not invariable
- unfortunate, valuable
- superficially noticeable
- gratifying and healthy
- satisfactory normal
- big concomitant
- early troublesome
- visible general
- almost diagnostic
- conspicuous and troublesome
- annoying prominent
- local anal
- entirely satisfactory and hopeful
- pathognomonical
- insidious and most dangerous
- distressing and most dangerous
- adverse and alarming
- invariable premonitory
- frequently distressing
- positively affirmative
- prominent but not invariable
- highly dangerous and perplexing
- noteworthy and constant
- common premonitory
- frequent and often troublesome
- noticeable and noteworthy
- cardinal mental
- chief and only obvious
- smallest permanent
- new, exceptional
- violent and intelligible
- dangerously frequent
- odd mortal
- common residual
- important subjective
- slightest premonitory
- common paranoid
- normal post-viral
- post-viral
- unintended, long-term
- inevitably flawed
- premonitory and important
- faintest premonitory
- slightest pathological
- faintest angry
- least ominous
- single alarming
- miserable bad
- common and most distressing
- prominent primary
- fatal premonitory
- common and comparatively trivial
- bad and mortal
- fitful and feverish
- sole and essential
- strong premonitory
- usual and unhappy
- least deceptive
- repulsive and dangerous
- deplorable and alarming
- prominent and annoying
- frequent preliminary
- earliest striking
- happy and striking
- exciting and alarming
- characteristic and constant
- neurotic or psychotic
- ominous and comprehensive
- other observable
- annoying and persistent
- other venereal
- practically unimportant
- familiar romantic
- uncomfortable and alarming
- satisfactory and hopeful
- general and violent
- purely youthful
- other premonitory
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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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