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 achievements
Below is a list of describing words for achievements. 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 achievements:
- wildest and most remarkable
- own and unassisted
- captivating military
- proudest bygone
- anonymous but entirely original
- hydraulical
- entirely commendable
- splendid and unforgettable
- solid and surprising
- military or legislative
- impressive asian
- proudest material
- miraculous scientific
- gallant but premature
- better quiet
- increasingly selfless
- valiant and unparalleled
- consistent and increasingly selfless
- unvaryingly successful
- outstanding diplomatic
- steady and unvaryingly successful
- greatest philanthropic
- greatest and most consummate
- irish artistic
- heroic or signal
- remarkably satisfactory
- finest and most monumental
- bright, crowning
- sporadic telepathic
- immense conversational
- ecclesiastical, political
- sole culinary
- immediate and small
- splendid but almost impossible
- systematic, world-wide
- stainless and unimpeachable
- historic and unforgettable
- artistic and satisfactory
- historic exemplary
- historic and wonderful
- splendid and indeed historic
- intellectual, cultural and economic
- infinitely meritorious
- great vaunted
- marvelous, indispensable
- gigantic or significant
- notable and indeed historic
- worthier poetical
- proud recent
- marvelous collective
- similarly glorious
- various and noteworthy
- cultural, artistic and social
- martial and literary
- vast biblical
- intrinsically artistic
- own all-important
- later gorgeous
- formidable technological
- grandest national
- successful artistic
- arcane technological
- numerous and impressive
- individual, temperamental
- titanic collective
- crowning technological
- countless technological
- final accidental
- greatest and far-reaching
- recent, spectacular
- incomparable, scientific
- real crowning
- further and even higher
- substantial and noteworthy
- incredible pedestrian
- evident but similarly dubious
- noisy and humorous
- revolting, amazing
- noble collective
- complete or satisfying
- surely admirable
- gradual literary
- literary, religious or political
- less epoch-making
- furious military
- last antislavery
- administrative, educational or industrial
- noteworthy and highly creditable
- later imaginative
- notable oratorical
- earliest cultural
- co-spiritual
- mediocre and unenlightened
- capital critical
- great and really wonderful
- national and magnanimous
- substantial individual
- peculiar and mischievous
- brilliant warlike
- absolutely up-to-date
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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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