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 afternoon
Below is a list of describing words for afternoon. 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 afternoon:
- memorable raw
- grey, oppressive
- gray late
- unusually raw and cold
- unusually raw
- endless sunny
- already late
- idle, late-summer
- suddenly stormy
- windless late
- now late
- blinding late
- quiet, bleached
- sultry late
- sickeningly horrible
- long and sickeningly horrible
- rainy midweek
- tense, disturbing
- incredibly proud
- still late
- gloomy late
- heavenly late
- hazy, sunny
- sticky sunny
- eternal pastoral
- delicious sunny
- usual foggy
- certain cloudy
- snappy, exhilarating
- gorgeously bright and autumnal
- fair, delightful
- late indian-summer
- particular busy
- cloudy, sultry
- blue and fiery
- ordinary late
- supposedly informal
- particularly mild and pleasant
- unusually warm and sunny
- terribly lifeless
- drowsy, easy
- certainly late
- phenomenally clear
- silvery autumnal
- sunny and cloudless
- incredible sunny
- sombre snowy
- long brazilian
- entire quiet
- nice thirsty
- slow, sweltering
- equally informative
- exciting and active
- cool and sad
- somewhat cool and sad
- weary and uneasy
- late radiant
- still rainy and misty
- deeply unwholesome
- viciously disagreeable
- wet, depressing
- late next
- muddy, murky
- horrible muggy
- white late
- direct late
- sultry, cloudy
- lovely late
- past mid
- still hot and sunny
- peaceful, nonworking
- humid, sunny
- fine late-summer
- enjoyably athletic
- lovely restful
- daily late
- sunny african
- memorable gusty
- hot and tranquil
- drowsy do-nothing
- rainy, warm
- dreary, tepid
- thin, uneasy
- frustrating and increasingly tense
- hot, enchanting
- entire late
- warm and still late
- tough, emotional
- lazy, hot
- lazy, sunny
- long, brisk
- coastal late
- idle, rainy
- barely late
- radiant and divine
- dull, wintry
- crisp, warm
- fine and quiet
- also hot and sunny
- amiable but deceitful
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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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