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 application
Below is a list of describing words for application. 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 application:
- lucrative practical
- mildly competitive
- frequent primitive
- subsequent desultory
- bloody, physical
- built-in terminal
- final and closest
- steady and cool-headed
- transcendental and platonic
- present uninterrupted
- tolerably routine
- not-so-liberal
- judicious or happy
- universal and perennial
- useful external
- singularly powerful and appropriate
- jocose irreverent
- conscious technical
- indolent careless
- incessant and intense
- serious linguistic
- careless or inexpert
- judicious and skilled
- equitable and intelligent
- unwise and abrupt
- eager and monotonous
- extensive and prolific
- direct and very important
- desultory and limited
- agent--special
- new and hitherto unparalleled
- bold and continuous
- convenient and reasonably accurate
- last, direct and complete
- painful but obvious
- various and convincing
- judicious and practical
- aesthetic and culinary
- coldly ruthless
- worthwhile military
- mere diligent
- dangerous and inevitable
- fearlessly candid
- rare metaphorical
- excellent external
- trivial mechanical
- unfair and partial
- intelligent and salutary
- vital and everlasting
- admirable and very ludicrous
- decidedly stringent
- unusually universal
- transparent personal
- careless and slight
- intense laborious
- sordid and low
- unexpected moral
- general or limited
- however general or limited
- personal and indiscriminate
- thoughtless and insufficient
- malicious or dangerous
- general or even extensive
- effectual external
- practical and continual
- uncritical, direct
- solemn, practical
- fragrant and effective
- unwholesome and useless
- intravaginal
- appreciable mental
- fearless and faithful
- fervent, desperate
- logical but unexpected
- fiery remote
- technological and mechanical
- interesting alternate
- good, full-scale
- practical, real-world
- extensive and almost universal
- mild and general
- poetical and spiritual
- improper or improvident
- liberal and straightforward
- general or absolute
- sufficient literal
- ultimate and most inspiring
- partial, uncertain
- persistent, uncompromising
- constant and almost devotional
- persistent but impossible
- audacious and fanatical
- constant and most vigorous
- rational and vigorous
- naive practical
- technical and specific
- general and pernicious
- sensible, evangelical
- --medicinal
- frequent and very apparent
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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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