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 affairs
Below is a list of describing words for affairs. 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 affairs:
- territorial and international
- afghan foreign
- foreign and political
- modest, private
- judicial and internal
- reasonably benign
- fairly black and white
- arduous and urgent
- ludicrous or trivial
- noisy and amusing
- lengthy and seemingly formal
- occasional civic
- massive regal
- ill, private
- totally corporeal
- amusingly superb
- double amusing
- unpleasant and preposterous
- complex multistage
- brutal and inept
- great or scandalous
- sordid medical
- monetary and economic
- otherwise heroic
- high flimsy
- weirdly male
- fairly black
- sumptuous, extravagant
- foreign nor domestic
- comfortable l-shaped
- parliamentary and foreign
- incredibly tactful
- internal and interprovincial
- whole open-work
- notoriously complex and difficult
- depressingly silent
- notoriously complex
- regular topsy-turvy
- puny and parochial
- exceedingly delicate and complex
- far-off galactic
- seemingly formal
- informally formal
- purely push-button
- difficult private
- entire, flimsy
- brilliant, notable
- humble one-story
- turkish internal
- scandalous and embarrassing
- extraordinary ecclesiastical
- therein human
- interior, foreign
- charitable or spiritual
- exclusively provincial
- resounding legal
- fashionable, tall
- brief, meteoric
- eerie, impressive
- short but torrid
- thine undisturbed
- tedious formal
- secret and intricate
- thin and economic
- dazzling modern
- soft and young
- bohemian little
- entirely questionable
- odd homemade
- humblest and meanest
- urgent private
- illicit royal
- long and extreme
- sad and hasty
- high and melodramatic
- unreasonable and unmasculine
- creative galactic
- flat and commonplace
- alert galactic
- smart, streamlined
- casual or even passionate
- entire infamous
- domestic german
- markedly masculine
- often chaotic
- uniquely different and difficult
- infrequently raucous
- brief and stupid
- awkward and unmanageable
- mad, torrid
- political, socio-economic or religious
- shockingly amateurish
- socio-economic or religious
- exceedingly regrettable
- sketchy, haphazard
- practical, pleasurable
- separate and most secret
- respectable but quite inferior
- devilish spanish
- annual and very exclusive
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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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