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 alarm
Below is a list of describing words for alarm. 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 alarm:
- hesitant false
- obvious silent
- darned false
- hysterical false
- sudden infinite
- mischievous false
- peculiar but quite vague
- other rousing
- local false
- top-secret personal
- sudden prudent
- blinking urgent
- brief, self-correcting
- vain or imaginary
- natural but vain
- inexpressible but useless
- swift and curious
- fat false
- indescribable and terrible
- own imprecise
- fabled arcane
- raucous but effective
- absolutely paranoid
- recent false
- loud bell-ringing
- vague, jealous
- everlasting false
- sylvan, faint
- arrival great
- silent, magical
- physical, nonspiritual
- simple false
- same two-syllable
- typical false
- tiny indescribable
- admittedly simplistic
- sudden, elemental
- silent, subjective
- notably louder
- unreasoning, big
- fogsignal
- genuine cruel
- cool, indiscreet
- sympathetic and groundless
- real ignorant
- sudden educational
- well-to-do, deep-seated
- largely inarticulate
- abroad unfounded
- worst false
- universal and serious
- great and even pious
- feverish and unreasoning
- hasty or painful
- dumb savage
- ragged and violent
- fresh plausible
- later incipient
- clumsy false
- general but small
- indescribable, inexplicable
- indescribable, anxious
- great and concurrent
- wide active
- general and thrilling
- billy additional
- afterward positive
- probably feigned
- continuous and watchful
- natural and not unwarranted
- hypocritical or false
- facetious and sarcastic
- extensive and dubious
- vague and conscientious
- undisguised and distressing
- ordinary timorous
- shrill, atonal
- large universal
- foremost, mental
- red push-button
- present and sudden
- indistinct and vague
- cloudy, uncertain
- general and intense
- normal false
- partially feigned
- massively loud
- crazy false
- definite false
- overpowering sweet
- weary and terrifying
- dazed, tumultuous
- insistent, belligerent
- audible or visual
- blinking scarlet
- frank, unreasoning
- nearly ultrasonic
- deeper instinctual
- insanely loud
- vague but deep
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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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