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 aid

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

  • worldwide humanitarian
  • planetary technical
  • sizable external
  • governmental or municipal
  • bilateral and multilateral
  • largest bilateral
  • invaluable magical
  • crucial logistical
  • defective, little
  • efficient and indispensable
  • material and respectable
  • additional bilateral
  • international and non-governmental
  • secret sympathetic
  • welcome, unexpected
  • material or metaphysical
  • dangerous and mercenary
  • perfidious and formidable
  • donor--bilateral
  • earthly ornamental
  • worldwide foreign
  • powerful and apparently indispensable
  • intelligent federal
  • concessional
  • swift and compassionate
  • moral and effective
  • considerable humanitarian
  • good zoological
  • devotional and material
  • unexpected and invaluable
  • human or auxiliary
  • victorian legal
  • singular and ready
  • also singular and ready
  • last adventitious
  • unwilling but distinctly suspicious
  • bilateral
  • vaunted billion-dollar
  • promising federal
  • ostentatious but ineffectual
  • useful visual
  • speedy and sufficient
  • imperial pecuniary
  • long-range foreign
  • dim and artifical
  • silent but efficient
  • consequent indirect
  • adventitious numerical
  • valuable and indeed indispensable
  • well-deserved congressional
  • thereof military
  • liberal royal
  • promising spanish
  • necessary, disinterested
  • strongest and most necessary
  • other, medical
  • invaluable optical
  • secondary, decorative
  • monetary and military
  • gracious and efficient
  • external and effective
  • less regional
  • sergical
  • poorest and most servile
  • tardy and doubtful
  • doubtful and reluctant
  • literally invaluable
  • temporary federal
  • additional and peculiar
  • efficient and necessary
  • traditional foreign
  • available certain
  • finer mechanical
  • well-meaning but ill-fated
  • promising treacherous
  • generous medical
  • technidal
  • makeshift regimental
  • social developmental
  • limited mutual
  • unselfish and sacrificial
  • medical and supernatural
  • occasional providential
  • perpetual supernatural
  • ready financial
  • invaluable secretarial
  • priceless decorative
  • chivalrous, loving
  • positive and available
  • indirect and insidious
  • uncertain and scanty
  • external pecuniary
  • timely legislative
  • artificial and imperfect
  • guilty and inflammatory
  • way--material
  • frequent and most efficient
  • gallant but superfluous
  • timely financial
  • however profitable

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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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