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 action
Below is a list of describing words for action. 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 action:
- non-violent direct
- alternately vivacious and sullen
- alternately vivacious
- immediate, constructive
- sublime, godlike
- typically thoughtless
- tubular pneumatic
- direct or hasty
- drastic or irrevocable
- emphatic direct
- foreign covert
- incorrect vocal
- appreciable corrosive
- drastic and degrading
- unannounced pre-emptive
- positive, immediate
- necessary evasive
- endearingly childlike
- correct vocal
- constant reciprocal
- crazed arboreal
- apparent but disciplinary
- belated evasive
- nationalist democratic
- joint or successive
- reckless and illegal
- unauthorized or independent
- independent and yet dependent
- more metamorphic
- swift preliminary
- definite electrolytic
- personal inventive
- high-energy physical
- irregular nervous
- other sedate
- superbly smooth
- parallel and simultaneous
- correct laryngeal
- virile and decisive
- swift and uncompromising
- brief but most terrible
- valiant final
- constant evasive
- apparently degrading
- indeed symbolic
- senes-cencial
- shockingly direct
- necessary and structural
- civil and almost criminal
- enough illustrative
- unwary and painful
- regular separate
- exciting vital
- wisest and most resolute
- different and wholly different
- abrupt and heedless
- fitting and cooperative
- concerted local
- prince--naval
- delicate childish
- further and other
- geological and geochemical
- generally rapid and decisive
- horrendously risky
- desperate and ill-advised
- corporate or militant
- muscular and emphatic
- present alluvial
- innocent and indispensable
- reckless, unexpected
- violent, antisocial
- dangerous independent
- violent and repressive
- final disciplinary
- unexpected, reckless
- unprecedented and violent
- thoughtless and hasty
- well-nigh instinctual
- immediate disciplinary
- noxal
- passionate reverential
- greatest and most unblemished
- independent, insubordinate
- absolutely fresh and unknown
- serious and disastrous
- secondary morbid
- noble and unheard-of
- independent muscular
- possible evasive
- human or elfin
- immediate large-scale
- deliberate violent
- mightiest volcanic
- immediate evasive
- prudent initial
- uncharacteristically chivalrous
- decisive and definitive
- understandably belligerent
- ceaseless swift
- real-life, heart-stopping
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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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