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 art
Below is a list of describing words for art. 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 art:
- immeasurably exalted
- finest fantastic
- right cruel
- nutty and contemporary
- vain phantom
- venerable and well-established
- magnificent and exotic
- royal or political
- insufficient former
- sentational
- esoteric and strictly racial
- western photographic
- superfluous and ostentatious
- ancient and indispensable
- regal or political
- unconscious and unintentional
- cheap, mighty
- pleasing rogue
- more elder
- small but rather special
- lower, weaker
- especially pictorial
- special and opportune
- antique and italian
- high, scientific
- old-fashioned--real
- slick commercial
- strict and stylized
- good casual
- own illusive
- high and sanctified
- imperfect, religious
- refined medical
- ingenious, harmless
- turn-of-the-century photographic
- big ritzy
- supposedly native
- gaunt and sulky
- weak dramatic
- beautiful erotic
- british culinary
- rhetorical or oratorical
- pleasant rogue
- wonderful self-conscious
- legitimate and general
- cunning and inimitable
- exquisitely realistic
- current black-and-white
- romantic imaginative
- invaluable mimetic
- inexhaustible conversational
- intuitive belial
- impassioned fine
- instructive fine
- quick and fresh
- immensely exalted
- ornamental and industrial
- sacred and legendary
- biggest floral
- french culinary
- durendal, white
- sanitary pastel
- brown depression-era
- bad abstract
- historic and monumental
- vicious and cannibalistic
- delicate and sensual
- authentic native
- impure and uncertain
- grave, ready
- municipal culinary
- italian figurative
- imitative and academic
- merely imitative and academic
- luminous and iridescent
- divine and most necessary
- profitable and ignoble
- fawning and flexible
- elegant irresistible
- conscious and admirable
- feminine fine
- inimitable constructive
- high expressive
- now empty and unstable
- ideal or theological
- purely emotional or imaginative
- pleasing and indeed wonderful
- egyptian ceramic
- popular symphonic
- fine or liberal
- glorious local
- foul or miscreant
- elementary graphic
- highest imitative
- primary manual
- vicious and false
- sacred, home-bred
- realistic decorative
- unique imaginative
- separate sacred
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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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