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 actor
Below is a list of describing words for actor. 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 actor:
- astonishingly boring
- windy melodramatic
- fat bad
- therefore beautiful
- alone skilful
- sooner skilful
- male professional
- famous middle-aged
- obscure and middle-aged
- chaste and clever
- scoundrelly clever
- visibly nervous and perspiring
- borderline messy
- former shakespearean
- third-rate tragic
- first-rate improvisatory
- scarcely first-rate
- former shakespearian
- serviceable comedic
- classy old
- bad but stubborn
- famed shakespearean
- always conscientious
- able comic
- honest and admirable
- young and hitherto unknown
- young principal
- boastful old-time
- good tragic
- wretched second-rate
- superb and magnetic
- quaintly comic
- august, omnipresent
- skilled and useful
- tall grown-up
- second-rate illiterate
- gay and superb
- chief and most useful
- bad but rather popular
- subtle, convincing
- forth principal
- jewish comic
- singular subordinate
- possibly principal
- popular melodramatic
- jaunty and juvenile
- stout, romantic
- young and versatile
- comic-journal
- popular shakespearian
- well-known shakespearian
- unpolished and unthinking
- popular and clever
- impossible fourth
- ostensible prominent
- promising but raw
- favorite and really great
- indifferent melodramatic
- thoroughly inartificial
- unsuccessful french
- thoughtful and highly skilled
- favorite and skilful
- universal and judicious
- pert but clever
- villainous third-rate
- uneven and reckless
- brilliant, elastic
- mostly unemployed
- new shakespearian
- remotely independent
- small but clever
- clever polish
- suave old
- greatest tragic
- slightly cute
- tiny and forgettable
- pro\-fes\-sional
- real all-round
- self-conscious bad
- wooden, disastrous
- notorious shakespearean
- damned unwilling
- slim former
- marvelous comic
- lunatic shakespearean
- young shakespearean
- twenty-five-year-old would-be
- dumb aspiring
- bland, professional
- brilliantly talented and gifted
- typical self-centered
- bow-tied comic
- bad and unconvincing
- fake and best
- skillful human
- �irrational political
- diabolically skillful
- super favorite
- twentieth-century irish
- everywhere chief
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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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