Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 Death

Below is a list of describing words for Death. 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 Death:

  • rigid, dreadful
  • violent and shameful
  • unseen, bloody
  • sure sudden
  • violent and ignominious
  • secret and infamous
  • pitilessly cruel
  • later delicate
  • ignoble and immediate
  • certain, horrible
  • painless and almost instantaneous
  • honorable, hard-fought
  • floor--real blood--real
  • ultimate kinetic
  • certain and painful
  • painful pointless
  • shameful and painful
  • premature and miserable
  • awfully sudden
  • worst, grim
  • unavoidable premature
  • tragic, pointless
  • grey brittle
  • timeless cruel
  • cruel, miserable
  • guilty, deserving
  • ignominious and unjust
  • excessively feeble and weak
  • pensions--tragical
  • therewithal, pale
  • else present
  • cruel and inevitable
  • deal pale
  • pointless, hideous
  • denial and partial
  • horribly drawn-out
  • premature and painful
  • real and bizarre
  • sadly inevitable
  • sudden inevitable
  • unjust and ignominious
  • speedy and painful
  • immediate and horrible
  • swift and piteous
  • quick two-step
  • clean, painless
  • cold and possible
  • sudden, political
  • sudden and gory
  • thorough and honorable
  • spectacular, magnetic
  • sudden infant
  • bloody and honorable
  • infinite, ageless
  • huge, oncoming
  • certain and horrible
  • simple speedy
  • terrifying, unknown
  • signal, certain
  • bizarre drug-related
  • cruel and slow
  • molten silvery
  • quick but painful
  • decent swift
  • inevitable but natural
  • swift and hideous
  • speedy and cruel
  • molecular or cellular
  • piteous and chaste
  • unequivocally preferred
  • coolly preferred
  • certain and manifest
  • severe and insupportable
  • certain and most painful
  • sudden and almost suspicious
  • quick and painless
  • clean and painless
  • final, implacable
  • alien orange
  • morally stark
  • horrible, tedious
  • quick and horrible
  • preferred inevitable
  • horrific and futile
  • certain and cruel
  • welcome true
  • slow, humane
  • certain, painful
  • certain oncoming
  • horrible accidental
  • premature and tragic
  • terrible and seemingly inevitable
  • totally unforeseen and sudden
  • suspicious and violent
  • sleepy slow
  • funeral and sudden
  • survival or meaningless
  • inevitable and ignominious
  • mandatory self-inflicted
  • inevitable, invisible

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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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