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 using
Below is a list of describing words for using. 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 using:
- official, regular
- efficient and creative
- fullest and most efficient
- shaky and little
- private non-commercial
- long-term and highly profitable
- sordid or commercial
- accurate and ready
- vulgar and shameless
- specific and humanitarian
- appropriate and strategic
- scandalously wasteful
- often unethical
- shameless and often unethical
- malicious, reckless
- still formal and rare
- fullest and most effective
- apparent teal
- precise and most efficient
- universal and neutral
- instinctively lavish
- sole and separate
- common governmental
- immediate, efficient
- extemal
- excessive and habitual
- general and frequent
- educational fair
- public non-commercial
- commercial and recreational
- other unauthorized
- tyrannical or subversive
- vaguely practicable
- occasional and clumsy
- efficient or logical
- unhappy and not much
- much profligate
- specialized or secret
- heavy, systematic
- necessary or common
- ordinary present
- sole and free
- luminous and uncommon
- solemn and considerate
- sovereign and uninterrupted
- immediate and uninterrupted
- economical and mobile
- effective and conscientious
- prudent, effective and conscientious
- fully productive
- consistently excessive
- substantial or exclusive
- primarily conventional
- free and confident
- maybe excessive
- destructive or warlike
- clumsy and destructive
- wise, middle-class
- premature and incessant
- grim or abject
- efficient imaginable
- widest and most intensive
- devastating practical
- local technological
- appallingly wasteful
- swift perfect
- topical or internal
- raw, unsubtle
- skillful and instructive
- frequent, skillful and instructive
- convulsive and feeble
- proper and temperate
- apt and judicious
- jains--general
- permanent and exceptional
- vain and sumptuous
- free and even daring
- ancient, true and principal
- free and skilful
- corrupt and prodigal
- daily successful
- unwise or unwarrantable
- common and unhindered
- exact and effective
- fine and constant
- exceptionally frequent
- true or extensive
- ultimately accurate
- proper or necessary
- domestic or commercial
- frequent and skilful
- extensive figurative
- frequent present
- common and present
- successful structural
- wide intentional
- widespread informal
- divine, great
- extensive and ever-growing
- press--general
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.
