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 absence
Below is a list of describing words for absence. 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 absence:
- temporary but sublime
- conspicuous and surprising
- quite conspicuous and surprising
- total and miraculous
- tedious dull
- montreal island--total
- island--total
- complete and most welcome
- desperately frustrating
- endless, momentary
- protracted and mysterious
- troops--total
- absolute or partial
- unexplained and painful
- ir-remedial
- equal utter
- long and unannounced
- complete, soulless
- welcome and studious
- clever and mysterious
- new and almost unusual
- possible brief
- brief and self-inflicted
- singular and almost total
- long, unexplained
- unannounced and protracted
- long unexplained
- conspicuous and heartbreaking
- unexpected and unavoidable
- ever-present, sickening
- unexplained three-day
- comparatively entire
- unaccountable long
- amazing and inexcusable
- perfect spontaneous
- manly elemental
- stern and manly elemental
- aforesaid total
- necessary and distant
- improper and unaccountable
- tedious and mournful
- utter and unaccountable
- startling and unreal
- long, lovelorn
- constant lengthy
- incomprehensible and inexcusable
- total and utterly inexcusable
- complete and noticeable
- alarming and mysterious
- necessarily continuous
- unpardonably primitive
- inevitable and unending
- entire or comparative
- unaccustomed and unexplained
- extraordinarily constant
- quite abnormal and portentous
- abnormal and portentous
- protracted and unaccountable
- always painful and wrong
- engrossed and grievous
- short but somewhat bitter
- holland--total
- disturbing all-night
- horrible simple
- recent and somewhat mysterious
- entire and striking
- contrary, total
- singular and protracted
- refusal and quiet
- avowed and entire
- real and workable
- fifth, entire
- temporary and ordinary
- unaccountable and unprecedented
- probably protracted
- short and voluntary
- utter, entire
- habitual persistent
- own protracted
- cheerful and refreshing
- natural, total
- complete congenital
- singular and lovable
- material, entire
- flat, complete
- mere and simple
- abstract and dreamy
- almost unusual
- almost total
- almost entire
- long and unexplained
- long and scandalous
- quite conspicuous
- >ir-remedial
- natural near-total
- two-year subjective
- voluntary and judicious
- unexpectedly long
- complete and impossible
- recent unaccountable
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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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