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 acting
Below is a list of describing words for acting. 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 acting:
- explicit and authentic
- same overt
- amendatory or supplemental
- next overt
- personally distasteful
- heinous male
- cruel or uncouth
- necessary, purposeful
- powerful but rather theoretical
- tortuous and almost unbearable
- deliberately antisocial
- lewd and lavish
- religious and meritorious
- spiritual bankrupt
- criminal appeal
- karmically inoperative
- unprecedented merciful
- final voluntary
- cosmopolitan world-weary
- final unnatural
- portugal, tyrannical
- voluntary or careless
- political high-wire
- irregular, unsuccessful
- ludicrously symbolic
- supplementary or explanatory
- overt and dangerous
- tripartite general
- unlawful and inhumane
- positive overt
- morally hideous
- one-sided sexual
- audacious and amazing
- simple and appalling
- involuntary and illegal
- revolting and messy
- self-consistent creative
- simple and impulsive
- important and irrevocable
- shameful and atrocious
- mischievous and wanton
- sacred and pontifical
- shameful or disgraceful
- praiseworthy and necessary
- tricky and deceitful
- temperate and premeditated
- irregular or undisciplined
- individual overt
- consciously criminal
- efficient sexual
- straight, selfish
- entirely selfless
- voluntary homicidal
- new unjust
- irrevocable, drunken
- obscene and ongoing
- uncharacteristic sacrificial
- emotional and public
- selfish and impulsive
- single epochal
- utterly self-sacrificing
- acutely unnatural
- dramatic, effective
- flagrantly illegal
- tragical and enormous
- immediate creative
- late declaratory
- judicious tractional
- foolish or imprudent
- foregone reckless
- needlessly violent
- apparently ignoble
- precipitous soviet
- horrendous terrorist
- profoundly political
- utterly unconscionable
- separate creative
- selfish, shameful
- disgusting and sinful
- final neurotic
- tragically solitary
- gratuitous good
- daring vaulting
- audacious, savage
- sudden and very uncharacteristic
- oddly necessary
- childish and essentially meaningless
- natural and unself-conscious
- final selfless
- grave and ultimate
- next-to-last stupid
- distinct creative
- grand fifth
- equally provocative
- formal and definitive
- instinctive and resistant
- overt and voluntary
- lurid, partial
- horrible and most unexpected
- arbitrary or violent
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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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