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 apology
Below is a list of describing words for apology. 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 apology:
- sorry weak
- intense, humiliating
- ill-timed and incoherent
- swift and contrite
- king--official
- distinctly necessary
- miserable and craven
- formal cold
- great and only legitimate
- idle complimentary
- sufficiently contrite
- perplexing contradictory
- servile and unqualified
- coaxing and almost piteous
- vain or insincere
- withdrawal and clumsy
- deeply miltonic
- private and abject
- oddly courteous
- slight, formal
- urgent, heartfelt
- formal and very sincere
- incredibly humble
- indirect autobiographical
- plausible and ready
- graceful parenthetical
- monstrously untenable
- temperate and eloquent
- naive editorial
- handsome but equivocal
- misshapen, dilapidated
- quaint and frank
- bitterly professional
- humble and suitable
- humble secretarial
- characteristic two-line
- sincerely modest
- ~~formal
- logical and well-rehearsed
- clumsy and feeble
- indirect but pretty distinct
- uncouth but good-humored
- momentary but keen
- sincerest formal
- hearty and ample
- public and most humble
- nasal and languid
- somewhat ingenious and amusing
- suitable and fitting
- inward rueful
- courteous and convincing
- eloquent and conclusive
- useless and late
- rapid, genial
- immediate and abject
- belated and lame
- additional comical
- lame and weak
- ample and abject
- flimsy and shameless
- obsolete and wretched
- suitable and graceful
- first-rate and most plausible
- essentially elegant
- sweet and essentially elegant
- customary and hateful
- awkwardly good-natured
- quick and insincere
- quick and abject
- much awkward
- quick and courteous
- meekest possible
- full, formal and public
- final, sincere
- passionate and morbid
- full and contrite
- fully inadequate
- halfhearted and fully inadequate
- deep abject
- equally canned
- unhappy, abject
- quite defiant
- perceptible mental
- appallingly loose
- nice abject
- proper, unilateral
- fresh, silent
- courteous, brief
- mute incomprehensible
- silent guilty
- poor somber
- proper and most courteous
- graceful and sincere
- grave and hasty
- actual, sincere
- sensible rational
- tardy and inefficient
- curiously abject
- terse and almost defiant
- forbidden--general
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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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