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 adversaries
Below is a list of describing words for adversaries. 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 adversaries:
- cunning and skilled
- successful and perfidious
- slight and defiant
- maddeningly self-assured
- bizarrely attired
- immortal and evil
- heroically consistent
- powerful and elusive
- wary and hostile
- rich and formidable
- persistent and myopic
- ingloriously helpless
- fugitive and distressed
- flexible and responsive
- extremely sensible and hard-nosed
- outwardly dangerous
- sensible and hard-nosed
- commonly formidable
- natural and official
- ingenious and energetic
- indefatigable and unconquerable
- inveterate, powerful and malicious
- seventh and most ancient
- influential avowed
- royal, political and ecclesiastical
- pitiless, barbarous
- politic and malicious
- tenacious and fearful
- heavy and mighty
- stubborn bearish
- unpredictable and unbalanced
- resolute and remorseless
- cunning and well-informed
- enraged domestic
- genuinely fiendish
- lenient or careless
- superior but still remote
- puny but ardent
- dextrous and watchful
- dangerous and most persistent
- young and practised
- victorious but ignorant
- puerile or imaginary
- illogical and irresolute
- outspoken, bitter
- powerful and particular
- crafty and skilful
- partly blind and unjust
- fearless and dangerous
- partly blind
- rapacious and merciless
- able and passionate
- mighty inhuman
- affectionately wise
- already humble
- biggest or strongest
- forlorn great
- impious and insidious
- sinister and intangible
- tremendously strong and agile
- troublesome and invincible
- invisible and tireless
- inglorious and despicable
- feeble, inglorious and despicable
- successful and implacable
- persistent philosophical
- extraordinarily skilful or vicious
- intractable and terrible
- watchful and cunning
- enraged feline
- imaginary or dummy
- rich and superior
- substantial and perilous
- wicked spiritual
- deliberately inimical
- impetuous burgundian
- weak and powerless
- canny and cunning
- many and potent
- permanent and equal
- apostatical
- less invincible
- resourceful and dangerous
- new transnational
- dangerously resourceful
- longer potential
- significant socialist
- small and evidently dangerous
- cunning and unpredictable
- additional would-be
- subtle chinese
- woeful and wretched
- larger, younger
- powerful and malicious
- powerful, potential
- open malevolent
- liberal and courteous
- conscientious and resolute
- onetime political
- adroit and powerful
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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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