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 apprehension
Below is a list of describing words for apprehension. 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 apprehension:
- deeper intuitive
- general and most sickening
- sickening and universal
- slow and perplexed
- preternaturally vivid
- troubled, doubtful
- vague but most terrible
- literal and pained
- considerable and genuine
- momentary, sensible
- ardent and special
- unaccountable, undefined
- intolerably contagious
- hasty and false
- mere craven
- vague but miserable
- tragic or moral
- lowest clear
- quicker intellectual
- unusually intense and vivid
- real or religious
- immediate, perceptive
- inner immediate
- morbidly scrupulous
- indefinite distressing
- steady and perceptible
- gloomy and vague
- breathless and heavy
- instinctive and irresistible
- vague but menacing
- ideal or sentimental
- dull, nightmarish
- painful and undefined
- slow and meek
- vague but keen
- organic and involuntary
- futile and nervous
- dreadful and urgent
- acute monkish
- full, unique
- constant and vague
- unexplained, unconquerable
- synthetic, dramatic
- singular and fastidious
- honorable but misguided
- indefinable, unreasonable
- deep and almost gloomy
- natural and fearful
- wakeful and affectionate
- away nervous
- constant and vivid
- lazy, desultory
- vague, depressing
- zeal and feverish
- human infallible
- absurd, obstinate
- secret but ever-present
- ordinary, earth-bound
- timid and groundless
- moral or appreciative
- undefined cold
- deep and sometimes gloomy
- wondrous preventive
- dispassionate and intelligent
- quite selfish
- emotional intuitive
- awful mystical
- nevertheless everlasting
- least, more or less
- profoundly emotional and sensuous
- imperfect and unwilling
- inexplicably acute
- solemn and well-founded
- acute and neurotic
- secret or personal
- intuitive, spontaneous
- sickening, intangible
- mournful, dull
- horrible watchful
- soft and dull
- dormant uneasy
- vigilant and not groundless
- grim, vague
- finer conscious
- sick, unacknowledged
- dark and sulky
- logical and poetical
- rather preconceived
- literal and exhaustive
- indirect and obscure
- traditional and imperfect
- merely traditional and imperfect
- intuitive and emotional
- disapproval and fearful
- abrupt and nervous
- great and voiceless
- ordinary and rather vulgar
- voluptuous, acute
- vague and dreary
- worthy adequate
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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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