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 adaptation
Below is a list of describing words for adaptation. 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 adaptation:
- indirect or potential
- direct or actual
- genetic evolutionary
- successful symbiotic
- requisite cosmetic
- considerable genetic
- enough cosmetic
- clever do-it-yourself
- new and classical
- coercive, educational
- late, selective
- admirably perfect
- past selective
- artificial or systematic
- professional or local
- ascertainably complete
- admirably reverent
- universal and reciprocal
- indirect individual
- direct or universal
- special congenital
- fittest and consequent
- blasphemous cinematic
- necessary but awkward
- odd but rather magnificent
- remarkable unconscious
- graceful, shivery
- perfect concurrent
- spirited and well-written
- structural and mental
- better psychophysical
- skilful mutual
- irreverent handmade
- highest all-round
- respectable mechanical
- wise continual
- skilful and utilitarian
- gradual and probably unconscious
- complex and supple
- needless and tasteless
- highly desirable and necessary
- visible or real
- material and individual
- cool and almost humorous
- skilful structural
- skilful or stupid
- uncommon functional
- obvious arboreal
- fossoral
- greater fossorial
- complete fossorial
- —universal
- loose, composite
- later specialized
- subjectively necessary
- fancy and skilful
- bold but not irreverent
- successful minimal
- admirable reciprocal
- instinctive and hearty
- ingenious mythological
- conscious and natural
- everywhere special
- skilful and fortunate
- marvellously exact
- still perfect
- superb dark
- subtle tribal
- odd symbiotic
- specialized and successful
- little biochemical
- be�havioral and biochemical
- artful and intelligent
- rather cheesy
- evolutionarily advantageous
- useful evolutionary
- basic sci-fi
- vague sci-fi
- ‘habitual
- finally habitual
- deft and adroit
- almost automatic and unconscious
- successful mutual
- incredibly feeble
- steady, exact
- corresponding biological
- rapid constitutional
- ingenious rhetorical
- functional and ecological
- other submissive
- specialized organic
- striking and witty
- truly daring
- complete and rational
- prophetic or typical
- imperfect and never-ending
- purposive mental
- conscious, systematic
- italian, modern
- —individual
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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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