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 activities
Below is a list of describing words for activities. 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 activities:
- illegal cross-border
- useless, repetitive
- low-level seismic
- marginal agricultural
- systematic instructional
- autonomous religious
- current or prior volcanic
- significant volcanic
- scientific, technological and economic
- meaningful technological
- severe volcanic
- unmistakable cerebral
- repetitive human
- further unappreciated
- significant agricultural
- sticky and furtive
- measurable consequent
- organic functional
- merely criminal
- formal economic
- limited volcanic
- mild volcanic
- exertional
- frivolous and unedifying
- substantial state-controlled
- primary economic
- unusual solar
- visible seismic
- little seismic
- prior volcanic
- indigenous economic
- recent and normal
- enormous, intellectual
- exotic amorous
- efficient and very pointless
- underground economic
- other seismic
- severed-head-removal
- savage volcanic
- additional exploratory
- constant dubious
- minimum solar
- impossible thermal
- unrelenting mental
- all-pervading and restless
- small-scale economic
- illicit economic
- prodigious baleful
- usual black-market
- nearby technological
- innocuous or even illegal
- essentially pedestrian
- also extracurricular
- serious partisan
- past rebellious
- significant biologic
- feverish secret
- continual and multitudinous
- horrible individual
- gross reproductive
- direct agricultural
- bustling, irrepressible
- enough incipient
- serious and constructive
- much seismic
- healthy and outgoing
- healthy and noisy
- day-to-day socioeconomic
- ususual
- recent extra-legal
- uncontrollable, hasty
- persistent humanitarian
- incessant intellectual
- singular ministerial
- private non-farm
- pure exertional
- laggard domestic
- intellectual and even material
- full constructive
- phenomenal and patriotic
- finite discursive
- feverish, ceaseless
- other technology-related
- admittedly illicit
- supposedly illegal
- unusual seismic
- alien recreational
- strong digital
- monastic and devotional
- useless and joyless
- considerable aerial
- main governmental
- extrapyramidal neuromuscular
- public health-related
- consistent and unrelenting
- tremendous seismic
- full and malignant
- identical but indeterminate
- excitedly bustling
- dreary, persistent
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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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