Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 adherence

Below is a list of describing words for adherence. 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 adherence:

  • heartfelt instinctive
  • blind and tenacious
  • servile, dull
  • strict and obstinate
  • general and influential
  • intentional and rigorous
  • subsequent loyal
  • strict and fantastic
  • tame and servile
  • docile and almost slavish
  • courageous and inflexible
  • unconditional conscious
  • rigid and consistent
  • constant exclusive
  • rigid and even fanatical
  • fastidious and inflexible
  • maniacally strict
  • invariable and intrepid
  • dim indolent
  • sticky and repugnant
  • staunch, religious
  • less verbal
  • strict and sensitive
  • heartfelt, instinctive
  • lukewarm or sceptical
  • almost narrow
  • senseless and slavish
  • patriotic and stoical
  • charitable and patriotic
  • late and half-hearted
  • rigid and stern
  • faithful and incorruptible
  • former unyielding
  • strict and even literal
  • rigid, complete
  • positive and obstinate
  • blind and dogmatical
  • relatively strict
  • fond and steady
  • unflinching and persistent
  • strict, truthful
  • never obvious
  • worth and steady
  • persistent and slavish
  • effete and pedantic
  • exuberant and unqualified
  • austere and faithful
  • rear tenacious
  • inert or dishonest
  • conscientious and stern
  • usually unreasonable
  • mere perverse
  • loyal and steadfast
  • faithful and uncompromising
  • steady and ardent
  • speedy and almost universal
  • unabashed and fearless
  • zeal persistent
  • past faithful
  • strict and even painful
  • contrary, strict
  • strict and steady
  • usual invincible
  • often unreasoning
  • unconscious and often unreasoning
  • somewhat slavish
  • bare and literal
  • faithful and solemn
  • narrow, unconditional
  • ridiculously strict
  • zealous and fervent
  • unselfish and high-minded
  • general and rigid
  • blind and irrational
  • typical teutonic
  • persistent and fruitful
  • generally faithful
  • superficial, external
  • thy hearty
  • almost slavish
  • more slavish
  • strict denominational
  • severe and inflexible
  • blind and extravagant
  • rigid and inexorable
  • absolute and blind
  • intensely conservative
  • such lukewarm
  • steady and systematic
  • honest and temperate
  • formal and solemn
  • usual scrupulous
  • obstinate, stupid
  • absolute and inflexible
  • zealous and constant
  • intelligent and systematic
  • steady and vigorous
  • honest and effective
  • same unswerving
  • cold and mechanical

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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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