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 aspirations
Below is a list of describing words for aspirations. 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 aspirations:
- generous or pious
- alone healthful
- solid presidential
- gentler or simpler
- vague and mournful
- subspiritual
- lofty, heavenward
- irresponsible libyan
- earliest and only geological
- exceedingly sublime
- worth and celestial
- often self-delusional
- ancient virginal
- zealous and solemn
- late momentary
- generous, humanitarian
- supervital
- liberal humanitarian
- vast but unsuccessful
- pent-up political
- wholly selfless
- high selfless
- weak but higher
- infinite, vague
- republican and liberal
- otherwise overweening
- perhaps abrupt
- ineffectual high
- similar unselfish
- vague and blind
- peculiar but very proper
- small, noble
- dire and forceful
- unexpected and still unclear
- impure unintellectual
- literary and legal
- headless, vague
- somehow ambitious
- sentimental but humane
- presumably infinite
- ardent and triumphant
- highest heavenward
- conscious vivid
- naturally noble and virtuous
- guttural loud
- unpremeditated and boundless
- noble but fleeting
- empty idealistic
- incessant, undying
- exalted ceremonial
- romantico-mystical
- more, spiritual
- letter-writing, patriotic
- practised and high
- fine eugenic
- high-strung mystic
- curious recurrent
- vague but irresistible
- unchristian and savage
- fervent and high
- vague and piquant
- whatsoever liberal
- brave and boundless
- devout or poignant
- impure, unintellectual
- sweetest and most fundamental
- impure or unintellectual
- particular patriotic
- mainly passionate
- vague and morbid
- strange but lofty
- possible senatorial
- dominant and religious
- unsatisfied intellectual
- freer, fresher
- pure, clear and sure
- blind but eager
- savage, intellectual
- constant exercise--perpetual
- vague, grotesque
- exercise--perpetual
- best incredible
- equally wistful
- boundlessly generous
- eager and indomitable
- directly socialistic
- futile patriotic
- essentially finest and noblest
- next ardent
- essentially finest
- incessant and passionate
- deep, deathless
- sacrilegious presidential
- proudest maternal
- innocently-sentimental
- strong, humane
- grandly ideal
- vague but exhilarating
- legitimate asiatic
- always pure and lofty
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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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