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 appearance
Below is a list of describing words for appearance. 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 appearance:
- awkward, ridiculous
- singularly formidable
- seedy, unshaven
- delicate, frothy
- suitably ominous
- appropriately dingy
- thick and robust
- exquisite and menacing
- ancient desolate
- busy physical
- almost pliable
- decorative and festive
- rather broken-backed
- comfortable, unchanged
- somehow bedraggled
- rather competent and self-confident
- rather competent
- hairy and brutish
- uncouth personal
- normal dubious
- uninspirational
- shabby and even absurd
- fat and sloppy
- deceivingly innocent
- marvellously deceptive
- generally rumpled
- yon curious
- lumbering and clumsy
- sudden and opportune
- curiously striped
- decidedly ecclesiastical
- unsightly broad
- speedy and quick
- extremely picturesque and singular
- rigidly professional
- fine personal
- rather top-heavy
- faintly haggard
- oddly cocky
- rather strange and wonderful
- unified, somber
- frugal and sallow
- particularly frugal and sallow
- whole disordered
- harshly nordic
- recognizable, facial
- clean corporate
- fantastic and extraordinary
- brown and spotty
- government--personal
- haggard and wild
- orthodox metallic
- youthful, ageless
- peculiarly fuzzy
- unkempt and filthy
- gray warlike
- desolate and untidy
- unnatural and desolate
- customary shabby
- black and unpleasant
- nearby dumb
- peculiar hairy
- spectral and ominous
- comfortable, down-to-earth
- handsome and respectful
- advantageous personal
- heavy and gloomy
- pleasing and fertile
- sleek and complacent
- majestic and agreeable
- indifferent and calm
- shiny, specious
- egypt--personal
- wonderfully architectural
- antique, artless
- formidable and vigorous
- cheerful and gracious
- transcendental illusory
- artless and respectable
- new and well-kept
- woeful, poverty-stricken
- amazing and realistic
- ominous, grim
- own nonstandard
- peculiarly succulent
- startlingly artificial
- piquant and strange
- otherwise arthritic
- haggard, febrile
- generally rumpled and unkempt
- abrupt and utterly unexpected
- deceitful and baffling
- strange and lifelike
- engagingly boyish
- charming and archaic
- illusive nor mysterious
- curiously drunken
- uncharacteristically two-dimensional
- almost misty
- slick greasy
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
