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 acquaintance
Below is a list of describing words for acquaintance. 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 acquaintance:
- diminutive and familiar
- last reputable
- familiar and accurate
- old and most ingenious
- old and very genteel
- your slight
- old and inconvenient
- somewhat intimate and mysterious
- immense casual
- skillful and wide
- vast and exact
- cool, common
- extensive female
- ancient faithful
- innocent and criminal
- pointedly complimentary
- intimate or extensive
- too-superficial
- recent, intimate
- slight and regrettable
- further honorable
- intimate and practical
- extensive and indiscriminate
- intimate and curious
- unseen--personal
- cold-blooded, ungenial
- specious, unsafe
- sly occasional
- suddenly informal
- long and intimate
- intimate practical
- former slight
- compelling old
- credulous and weak
- sufficiently promising
- late transient
- least, well-known
- familiar or definite
- intimate and accurate
- half-forgotten diplomatic
- clearer, fuller
- wide and intimate
- new-found irish
- critical or practical
- recent and limited
- considerable conventional
- personal sensible
- gradually fuller
- fortunate and profound
- traditional or hereditary
- new and somewhat bashful
- brief and very slight
- interesting, unscientific
- long or familiar
- partial or superficial
- occasional prying
- extensive and intimate
- intimate previous
- thorough previous
- accurate and familiar
- accidental but extraordinary
- short and strange
- wide international
- unusual but sympathetic
- undesirable old
- accurate but superficial
- unusual and thorough
- amiable but casual
- familiar and boring
- eager, casual
- abrupt and intimate
- rather extensive and intimate
- closer topographical
- earliest and boyish
- pink and hard
- extensive and agreeable
- intelligent and very intimate
- intimate superficial
- casual but interesting
- former academic
- absent useless
- strict and happy
- old and rather faulty
- ordinary and even superficial
- technical and completely impersonal
- large unsuspected
- slightest and most formal
- casual or indifferent
- closer or even further
- sarcastic nationalist
- mere pick-up
- previous extensive
- mischievous common
- sufficient rudimentary
- furtive and very formal
- smallest intimate
- new bibliomaniacal
- extensive or accurate
- long tasteless
- itinerant tropical
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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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