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 assistance

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

  • substantial international
  • clumsy but willing
  • humanitarian and technical
  • legal magical
  • danish economic
  • french financial
  • sometimes obstructive
  • british budgetary
  • ultimate and effectual
  • occasional, fortuitous
  • discreet and carefully limited
  • open and warlike
  • financial and technical
  • considerable competent
  • last unsolicited
  • opportune pecuniary
  • usual invaluable
  • indirect financial
  • grudging, part-time
  • trivial meteorological
  • usual, late
  • quiet but valuable
  • additional governmental
  • federal-state public
  • robotic and computerized
  • visual and cognitive
  • conclusion�additional military
  • essential and successful
  • mutual legal
  • generous foreign
  • safe humanitarian
  • skilful and voluntary
  • whole and best
  • pecuniary and military
  • unflinching, indefatigable
  • gallant and cordial
  • valuable gratuitous
  • magnanimous and extraordinary
  • urgent humanitarian
  • necessary secretarial
  • military, industrial and technical
  • endless and invaluable
  • your invaluable
  • zeal, foreign
  • unselfish and supernatural
  • gracious and invisible
  • turkish financial
  • adequate and continuous
  • unfailing and most generous
  • concrete and effectual
  • welcome valuable
  • large-scale foreign
  • unique and faithful
  • foreign or adequate
  • friendly individual
  • again medical
  • practicable medical
  • great and very opportune
  • timorous but efficient
  • mutual judicial
  • thence immediate
  • material surgical
  • massive, multi-annual
  • least hereditary
  • international humanitarian
  • ready and valuable
  • colonial medical
  • valuable and sympathetic
  • vital foreign
  • bilateral foreign
  • more further
  • active and sincere
  • clever and thoughtful
  • mystical or divine
  • immediate technical
  • tional human
  • quiet financial
  • furiously reluctant
  • medical and humanitarian
  • able magical
  • welcome magical
  • little and poor
  • necessary, material
  • promising material
  • requisite conchological
  • bustling and officious
  • medical and financial
  • enthusiastic and invaluable
  • unexpected and rather judicial
  • legal or pecuniary
  • speedy and substantial
  • skilled architectural
  • efficient and obliging
  • indeed manual
  • humane and skilled
  • splendid and most generous
  • lavish, periodical
  • utmost psychic
  • contraband, hostile
  • spiritual or corporeal

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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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