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 anxieties
Below is a list of describing words for anxieties. 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 anxieties:
- never mild
- sheer asexual
- obsessive, fearful
- much contentious
- abnormal and irrational
- stiff, blinking
- possible unselfish
- partly ordinary
- respectful and grave
- past and morbid
- maniacal maternal
- aside paternal
- perplexed suspicious
- heavy, overwhelming
- immediate and uncertain
- chronic, morbid
- bitter, keen
- impatient, unnecessary
- sharp and terrifying
- omnipresent and abiding
- greatest and most intense
- queer, furtive
- individual craven
- desperately acute
- liveliest and most affectionate
- selfish or social
- doctrinal and physical
- acute subconscious
- free queer
- intense and unaccountable
- private and extremely modern
- expectant tacit
- vague and various
- sorrowful stern
- heavy and various
- mild or sporadic
- frantic and indecent
- restless poignant
- zeal and obvious
- senseless and inordinate
- personally considerable
- petty and scrupulous
- immediate, active
- jealous and fond
- inexpressible wistful
- affectionate and maternal
- certain wide-eyed
- truly justifiable
- old and essential
- deep and unexplained
- private seafaring
- fierce, hostile
- farther transient
- terrible poignant
- sombre, germanic
- vague nervous
- morbid and fanatical
- fake hysterical
- intolerable piteous
- heavy, desolate
- continual and grave
- soft maniacal
- acute and constant
- uniquely deep
- sharper and closer
- ceaseless and sordid
- calm international
- nervous and agonizing
- long and unspeakable
- miserable and overwhelming
- small prosaic
- loving and authentic
- innumerable prosaic
- breathless and painful
- still perverse
- zeal and incessant
- engrossing, maternal
- constant, ever-increasing
- unendurable and irritating
- deep and often terrible
- utmost and most painful
- evident doubtful
- manifest profound
- proximate and unavoidable
- greatest and frankest
- extreme and feverish
- pleasingly painful
- sensitive and almost painful
- proper and requisite
- pure servile
- general unacknowledged
- fresh and dire
- much harrowing
- usual superfluous
- curious and possibly morbid
- painful and prayerful
- ever-present filial
- eager and timorous
- palpable and fond
- anxious, such
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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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