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 accumulation

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

  • muddy, inhospitable
  • subsequent vast
  • effectively mindless
  • pathological and dangerous
  • enormous and quite inconceivable
  • five-foot, one-inch
  • probably over-large
  • interior unclean
  • thoroughly parallel
  • inevitable electric
  • extraordinary irregular
  • exceedingly gradual and imperceptible
  • steady and ominous
  • stupendously daring
  • moderate but miscellaneous
  • early fat
  • ancient and gradual
  • greatest immeasurable
  • corresponding submarginal
  • unnecessary and dreadful
  • continuous capital
  • much capitalist
  • colossal and continual
  • various unclassified
  • rusty, dried-up
  • entire awesome
  • social and secular
  • quiet and remorseless
  • logarithmical
  • inconceivably massive
  • satisfying additional
  • massive ionic
  • perilous and senseless
  • back lifelong
  • greater vibrational
  • frighteningly thick
  • slow, sedimentary
  • undue or extraordinary
  • successful pecuniary
  • previous vast
  • small but perpetual
  • radical and powerful
  • immense and unnatural
  • wearisomely monotonous
  • enormous and sudden
  • exceedingly gradual
  • vast fetid
  • modern vast
  • gradual but continual
  • further fat
  • rarer or costlier
  • venerable but incomprehensible
  • terrestrial glacial
  • simple progressive
  • fecal or other
  • rich undisturbed
  • usual, silent
  • quite inconceivable
  • quick and speculative
  • equally inexhaustible
  • complex cultural
  • accidental, mechanical
  • volatile, dangerous
  • invidious and unjust
  • usual overall
  • singularly important
  • vast and unparalleled
  • much alluvial
  • careful and persistent
  • biggest man-made
  • long temporal
  • unparalleled literary
  • now unwieldy
  • astonishingly rich
  • steady but sure
  • enormous conical
  • incessant and infinite
  • recent natural
  • curiously fantastic
  • excessive or abnormal
  • vast numerical
  • fresh and unsuspected
  • usual heterogeneous
  • little constant
  • _occasional
  • gradual and imperceptible
  • neat and speedy
  • gradual and silent
  • increasingly lethal
  • altogether worthless
  • little primary
  • sufficiently thick
  • great chaotic
  • almost haphazard
  • slow and gradual
  • astonishing mental
  • large and rapid
  • sudden and enormous
  • large extra
  • entire artistic

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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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