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 affair
Below is a list of describing words for affair. 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 affair:
- modest, private
- reasonably benign
- ludicrous or trivial
- noisy and amusing
- lengthy and seemingly formal
- occasional civic
- massive regal
- totally corporeal
- amusingly superb
- double amusing
- unpleasant and preposterous
- brutal and inept
- otherwise heroic
- weirdly male
- sumptuous, extravagant
- comfortable l-shaped
- incredibly tactful
- whole open-work
- depressingly silent
- regular topsy-turvy
- exceedingly delicate and complex
- seemingly formal
- purely push-button
- entire, flimsy
- humble one-story
- scandalous and embarrassing
- brief, meteoric
- short but torrid
- tedious formal
- thin and economic
- dazzling modern
- soft and young
- bohemian little
- entirely questionable
- odd homemade
- illicit royal
- sad and hasty
- unreasonable and unmasculine
- flat and commonplace
- smart, streamlined
- entire infamous
- markedly masculine
- uniquely different and difficult
- brief and stupid
- mad, torrid
- shockingly amateurish
- exceedingly regrettable
- practical, pleasurable
- respectable but quite inferior
- annual and very exclusive
- strange and seemingly inexplicable
- uncomfortably straight-backed
- neat sylvan
- broken-down and worthless
- gaudy, tasteless
- treacherous, unlucky
- undisclosed dark
- merely formal and conventional
- godless, mindless
- curious and very tragic
- pompous and intricate
- most humorous
- ighly unusual
- dingy flowered
- delicate and tedious
- serious and worrisome
- hasty and cursory
- brief but very passionate
- elaborately striped
- wildly sexual
- hectic extramarital
- parallel but quite different
- ridiculous and regrettable
- typical, conical
- perilous and grave
- wretchedly retail
- lavish and lengthy
- entire horrendous
- complex and lengthy
- formidable and dramatic
- shaky, undisciplined
- strictly armored
- infernally complex
- dull well-dressed
- typically sloppy
- fairly drab
- conceivably tragic
- lurid and conceivably tragic
- mad, illicit
- sordid and adulterous
- importantly funny
- remarkably bloody
- obvious or uninteresting
- difficult and violent
- smashing, exciting
- small and rather funny
- small synchronous
- all-student
- simple, all-student
- wretched crippling
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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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