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 accomplishments
Below is a list of describing words for accomplishments. 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 accomplishments:
- nicer meaningless
- purely elegant
- petty and purely elegant
- several fantastical
- gentle physical
- necessary, ornamental
- fashionable and necessary
- unfashionable domestic
- crazed, accidental
- stunning and gilded
- high-tech personal
- favorable and successful
- worth and elegant
- creepy and enviable
- unimpeachable internal
- difficult or improbable
- recent flimsy
- partly difficult
- serious divine
- inconceivable physical
- magical, miraculous
- poetical or personal
- grim, honest
- subtle and almost intangible
- tolerably rare
- practised liberal
- savage and cultured
- hence linguistic
- pleasing or graceful
- wonderful and many-sided
- fascinating and practical
- uncommon female
- slow but true
- advantageous and valuable
- especial aesthetic
- useless and giddy
- brilliant or useful
- extraordinary and single
- remarkable mystic
- latest and most intellectual
- specific noteworthy
- successful and easy
- musical and cultural
- invariable literary
- pacific and elegant
- polite and comparatively harmless
- sundry dazzling
- mystic, full
- ingenious and rare
- wearisome and superfluous
- exclusively muscular
- queer, unfashionable
- eminent external
- modern and very modern
- eccentric and various
- mysterious and unheard-of
- fine and unforgettable
- sole lingual
- pleasant minor
- hard-earned or desirable
- other gubernatorial
- splendid but fragmentary
- mental, moral and personal
- pleasing or popular
- unheard-of culinary
- false and musical
- few ladylike
- polite and even humorous
- habitually practised or much
- greatest geographic
- frivolous and meretricious
- unusual and unsuspected
- vulgar or obsolete
- ultimate vocational
- liberal and genteel
- suitable and amiable
- graceful, usual
- last or least
- paltry and merely ornamental
- capital feminine
- nevertheless indispensable
- heretofore valuable
- common and accessible
- proudest constructive
- similar showy
- graceful mental
- doubtful, rare
- rare, doubtful
- proportionately shallow and incomplete
- proportionately shallow
- clever, amateurish
- dubious musical
- many requisite
- hollow, superficial
- showy fashionable
- contrary fine
- slight but popular
- exterior and superficial
- persooaal
- new and very limited
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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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