Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 affirmation

Below is a list of describing words for affirmation. 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 affirmation:

  • sublime, impersonal
  • hearty, fruitful
  • official but not warm
  • uncorrected, popular
  • forthcoming religious
  • passionate and unqualified
  • convincing and most painful
  • growingly popular
  • entire smug
  • [mutual
  • continuous and simultaneous
  • solemn avowal
  • balanced and tentative
  • daring and inspiring
  • direct, vertical
  • humorous and reckless
  • lurid and tremendous
  • unaffected and sparkling
  • persistent, invincible
  • constant and scrupulous
  • universal contemporaneous
  • passionate and stupid
  • last inclusive
  • peremptory, absolute
  • dogmatical and absolute
  • vigorous incessant
  • constant audible
  • clear or distinct
  • apt symbolic
  • bland positive
  • underground subversive
  • tranquil and extraordinary
  • contrary or contradictory
  • emphatic or solemn
  • wretched, makeshift
  • positive, interior
  • single categorical
  • strong or rich
  • common and compelling
  • continuous, intense
  • dauntless triumphant
  • direct and clear
  • direct and impressive
  • simple unqualified
  • constant, unfailing
  • beautiful, erotic
  • sufficiently emphatic
  • deep savage
  • desperate and defiant
  • away positive
  • violent, blind
  • solemn double
  • true and positive
  • urgent mental
  • primary spiritual
  • perfect harmonious
  • sensationally dramatic
  • urgent and emphatic
  • plain and indisputable
  • explicit and positive
  • equally blind
  • lusty little
  • distinct and deliberate
  • tranquil and beautiful
  • absolute and invariable
  • open and joyous
  • further positive
  • proud and joyous
  • doubtful and uncertain
  • definite, positive
  • deepest and most solemn
  • direct and vivid
  • direct and explicit
  • less dogmatic
  • scientific and spiritual
  • fuller and clearer
  • much mysterious
  • formal public
  • bold, bright
  • genuine scientific
  • own solemn
  • sacred and solemn
  • creedal
  • twelvefold
  • immense human
  • strong, positive
  • single moral
  • mere temporal
  • particularly enthusiastic
  • strong, bold
  • great and far-reaching
  • clear and unequivocal
  • declaratory
  • equally characteristic
  • avowal
  • own persistent
  • false and foolish
  • rather startling
  • categorical
  • universal and eternal

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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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