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 adjectives
Below is a list of describing words for adjectives. 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 adjectives:
- proper four-dimensional
- joyful, exuberant
- few pejorative
- distributive pronominal
- dangerously ambiguous
- many participial
- --pronominal
- significant provincial
- descriptive and definitive
- singular possessive
- numerous and highly poetic
- particular pronominal
- abundant and incongruous
- substantive, personal
- negative catch-all
- alien and combative
- thoroughly negative
- french and tahitian
- stupidly false
- equally pronominal
- singular substantive
- loving and bold
- latinical
- unnecessary and highly inappropriate
- much-abused and nearly meaningless
- poetic and striking
- other loud-voiced
- clean-cut and descriptive
- hysterical superlative
- sonorous italian
- masculine french
- present participial
- conventional derogatory
- condemnatory and other
- familiar but very unpleasant
- polly passionate
- humorous or contemptuous
- however many and diverse
- ordinal numeral
- gorgeously florid
- redundant but gorgeously florid
- alike inapplicable
- indefinite pronominal
- weird and fearsome
- so-called possessive
- similar superlative
- fewer descriptive
- high-sounding alliterative
- sprightly incoherent
- also descriptive
- archaic or uncommon
- obvious laudatory
- analogous participial
- many participal
- definite numeral
- compound personal
- tame and facile
- pronominal
- participial
- proud and affectionate
- common shakespearean
- numerous colorful
- next stinging
- enough luminous
- irrelevant and inaccurate
- breathless, sloppy
- totally irrelevant and inaccurate
- precise and annoying
- particularly derogatory
- editorial, fewer
- _pronominal
- indefinite relative
- --participial
- double canadian
- participial or verbal
- such participial
- compound relative
- notional and personal
- negative indefinite
- however many
- apparently far-fetched
- many superlative
- other and best
- incessant and weary
- single adequate
- fashionably extravagant
- terribly appropriate
- also concrete
- also possessive
- many numeral
- inevitable descriptive
- just useless
- comparatively democratic
- few pronominal
- new comprehensive
- same pronominal
- explosive french
- strong and pithy
- personal possessive
- regular possessive
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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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