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 arts
Below is a list of describing words for arts. 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 arts:
- immeasurably exalted
- finest fantastic
- practised magical
- right cruel
- useful and fine
- nutty and contemporary
- frivolous black
- vain phantom
- mechanical and fine
- venerable and well-established
- industrial and fine
- magnificent and exotic
- royal or political
- insufficient former
- sentational
- arcane and martial
- esoteric and strictly racial
- noblest useful
- western photographic
- liberal and mechanical
- superfluous and ostentatious
- greater fine
- ancient and indispensable
- regal or political
- unconscious and unintentional
- cheap, mighty
- pleasing rogue
- more elder
- causal and co-operative
- small but rather special
- vain diplomatic
- lower, weaker
- unprofitable and superfluous
- especially pictorial
- special and opportune
- antique and italian
- useful or elegant
- high, scientific
- western martial
- old-fashioned--real
- illegal martial
- slick commercial
- intricate sensuous
- strict and stylized
- mechanical and useful
- good casual
- phonetic and graphic
- own illusive
- alluring and voluptuous
- high and sanctified
- minor decorative
- imperfect, religious
- plastic and pictorial
- refined medical
- ingenious, harmless
- older martial
- turn-of-the-century photographic
- exotic martial
- big ritzy
- main martial
- supposedly native
- slow and safer
- gaunt and sulky
- sedentary and servile
- weak dramatic
- assorted martial
- beautiful erotic
- fancy martial
- british culinary
- perceptible various
- 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
- asian martial
- quick and fresh
- industrial and esthetic
- immensely exalted
- ornamental and industrial
- sacred and legendary
- biggest floral
- french culinary
- oriental martial
- durendal, white
- decadent and decorative
- sanitary pastel
- increasingly decadent and decorative
- brown depression-era
- increasingly decadent
- bad abstract
- stocky martial
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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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