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 abilities
Below is a list of describing words for abilities. 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 abilities:
- human elemental
- telepathic and kinetic
- emotionally perceptive
- innate telepathic
- zeal and proud
- professionally casual
- odd vibrational
- superior erotic
- kinetic and telepathic
- amazing choreo-graphical
- choreo-graphical
- particular prescient
- extraordinary administrative
- discernible magical
- intellectual and statesmanlike
- conspicuous scholastic
- greater mathematical
- linguistic and verbal
- phenomenal manipulative
- much absorptive
- analytical or cognitive
- just analytical
- just analytical or cognitive
- stupendous athletic
- fair telepathic
- humble deductive
- peculiar analytic
- phenomenal mental
- slightest usable
- formerly latent
- lean and low
- phenomenal athletic
- independent judgmental
- psychic and mystical
- neanderthal linguistic
- puny rational
- frightening, concrete
- legendary psychic
- unchallenged technical
- newfound telepathic
- mystic intuitive
- fantastic linguistic
- industrial or technical
- ~drnittedly limited
- parallel mathematical
- unreliable human
- inconsiderable natural
- limited english-speaking
- limited predictive
- deadly innate
- raw athletic
- antiquarian and linguistic
- rudimentary reproductive
- random skill
- evolutionary new
- erratic telepathic
- prodigal intellectual
- human kinetic
- seasonal cognitive
- latent telepathic
- wereanimal
- long-distance telepathic
- magical or psychic
- fair administrative
- erratic skill
- numerous and marvelous
- unquestioned technical
- unique and still unexplained
- mediocre digital
- worth, natural
- rare strategic
- general hacking
- abundant controversial
- romantic, egotistic
- signal editorial
- rare administrative
- latent kinetic
- innate magical
- queer mathematical
- musical and magical
- apparently musical
- definite telepathic
- equilibrational
- much administrative
- marginal telepathic
- same telepathic
- rarer mental
- one-way tactile
- arcane mental
- important, logistical
- quirky but awesome
- uncanny innate
- sometimes quirky but awesome
- independent instructional
- far stronger and wider
- cold deductive
- exceptional visual
- towering professional
- verbal and numerical
- amazing choreographical
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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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