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 aspects
Below is a list of describing words for aspects. 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 aspects:
- sentimentally dramatic
- scenic and social
- singularly piquant and alluring
- singularly piquant
- weirdly voracious
- distinctly economical
- fair, rural
- alien and monstrous
- technical, medical
- cross-cultural, cross-temporal
- rugged, savage
- especially repellent
- momentary and fictitious
- faintly sooty
- oral addictive
- amazing and macabre
- esoteric physical
- tragic and fierce
- wiser other
- 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
- myriad deceptive
- medico-criminal
- further intriguing
- helpless outer
- universal and philosophical
- 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
- strange or even repulsive
- consistent and considerable
- crudest and most clamorous
- stupid, forlorn
- minor and milder
- rubicund and social
- mathematically certain
- grimly business-like
- tiny imperceptible
- curiously antique
- disturbingly negative
- orsova--oriental
- worst and most revolting
- somewhat filthy
- mythological and symbolical
- delightful, foreign
- mentally distinct
- pleasing and civilized
- important and contrary
- businesslike and innocent
- unprotected, remote
- menacing and terrible
- strikingly venerable
- static and absolute
- less phrenological
- grand and awesome
- remote visionary
- individual incorporating
- useful incidental
- pertinent biological
- menacing, ominous
- routine and mundane
- symbolic, archetypal
- unrealistic or tawdry
- curious and alien
- sombre and uninviting
- harsh and infernal
- technological, political and social
- different and surprising
- ever-changing and often menacing
- narrower, baser
- often menacing
- 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
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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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