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 affection
Below is a list of describing words for affection. 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 affection:
- fond, general
- lively maternal
- double and sacred
- grateful and open
- sheer, disgraceful
- nonpaternal
- paternal and nonpaternal
- tasteful and thoughtful
- quiet, proprietary
- disinterested and absurd
- childlike, credulous
- lonely pure
- inexpressible and very singular
- pure, fraternal
- special and boundless
- watchful, tireless
- sincere and unbounded
- sincere inviolable
- sufficiently deep and stable
- filial and conjugal
- merely canine
- mutual and engrossing
- uneasy and carnal
- suspicious, uneasy and carnal
- loyal and vehement
- furious and indiscreet
- principal and immoderate
- dutiful filial
- [maternal
- anxious and filial
- sullen and almost animal
- old-fashioned, inveterate
- secret but partial
- innocent bold
- wholly unrequited
- hopeless and wholly unrequited
- chronic, intermittent
- anxious and disinterested
- spontaneous, long-suffering
- foolish fruitless
- true but reckless
- fond reciprocal
- kindred and natural
- grateful and extravagant
- open, unabashed
- unreasoning and fierce
- purest and most steadfast
- strange back-door
- deep and uncertain
- obvious and ardent
- sentimentally superstitious
- honours--filial
- ardent self-sacrificing
- ardent submissive
- deep-seated nervous
- constant, good
- childlike credulous
- genuinely maternal
- unalterable and profound
- formal, platonic
- monstrous and cynical
- maternal and fraternal
- mother--reciprocal
- mutual strong
- sadly inoperative
- joyful and proud
- once mutual
- always sympathetic and receptive
- frenzied and anxious
- pitiful and unreasoning
- spontaneous and boundless
- weak or abject
- singular conjugal
- ardent or overbearing
- thoroughly high and sincere
- deep and ill-starred
- dormant filial
- unqualified mutual
- undiminished and unalterable
- condescending, curious
- ardent filial
- noble honest
- real and virtuous
- genuine, ever-growing
- evident real
- particular companionable
- unconditional, true
- sometimes plain
- keenest parental
- unhappy and immortal
- frank and evident
- rough maternal
- contemptuous but real
- slightly contemptuous but real
- clearly tolerant
- broad, uncritical
- curiously invincible
- awful and reverential
- forth warm and enthusiastic
- unnatural and disordered
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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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