Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 aspect

Below is a list of describing words for aspect. 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 aspect:

  • singularly piquant and alluring
  • singularly piquant
  • weirdly voracious
  • distinctly economical
  • alien and monstrous
  • technical, medical
  • cross-cultural, cross-temporal
  • especially repellent
  • momentary and fictitious
  • faintly sooty
  • amazing and macabre
  • tragic and fierce
  • diverse and grotesque
  • infernally noble
  • soulless crazy
  • exceedingly hideous
  • weirdest single
  • piquant and alluring
  • botanical, agricultural and technical
  • naturally sober
  • colder scientific
  • humorous but truculent
  • counsellors--political
  • peace--political
  • pleasant and comic
  • medico-criminal
  • helpless outer
  • extremely haggard
  • maddening and annoying
  • essentially repellent
  • volatile and essentially repellent
  • strangely ritual
  • wretchedly ironical
  • unspeakably seductive
  • awful felonious
  • singularly grave and awful
  • desolate and mournful
  • consistent and considerable
  • stupid, forlorn
  • rubicund and social
  • grimly business-like
  • curiously antique
  • orsova--oriental
  • somewhat filthy
  • delightful, foreign
  • pleasing and civilized
  • businesslike and innocent
  • unprotected, remote
  • menacing and terrible
  • strikingly venerable
  • static and absolute
  • less phrenological
  • grand and awesome
  • remote visionary
  • useful incidental
  • menacing, ominous
  • symbolic, archetypal
  • curious and alien
  • harsh and infernal
  • different and surprising
  • narrower, baser
  • harsh and ominous
  • rusty, withered
  • hopeless and unmarried
  • distinctly hopeless and unmarried
  • distinctly hopeless
  • specially biblical
  • shrunken and forlorn
  • daring warlike
  • bloody and portentous
  • rustic, bucolic
  • eternally tragic
  • absurdly pale
  • sinister, baleful and portentous
  • baleful and portentous
  • showy, promising
  • grand and promising
  • sufficiently life-like
  • ephemeral and gay
  • busy city-like
  • different and unsatisfactory
  • broad and very clear
  • youthful and merry
  • full separate
  • generally fabulous
  • fearful and ferocious
  • virtual colonial
  • unimaginative and accidental
  • gorgeous and sombre
  • wild and stealthy
  • wistful, uneasy
  • open and florid
  • gloomy and austere
  • crazed and haggard
  • tattered and bedraggled
  • alien and normally inaccessible
  • present tri-dimensional
  • cruel and frightening
  • grave and benignant
  • vulnerable single

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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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