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 athletes
Below is a list of describing words for athletes. 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 athletes:
- red-haired natural
- prominent but stupid
- promising all-round
- damned sexual
- erstwhile professional
- bold and sinewy
- tough, gritty
- strong and gifted
- muscular italian
- vivacious, enthusiastic
- stout aquatic
- clear-eyed, supple
- possible, prominent
- general or famous
- stalwart, clear-eyed
- young journalistic
- proper, british
- young, cheery
- debonair and spirited
- painstaking or excellent
- stalwart dusky
- naturally painstaking or excellent
- husky, well-trained
- naturally painstaking
- crowning successful
- agile and skilful
- all-round public-school
- austere and strenuous
- first-class, all-round
- first-rate public-school
- sturdy, heroic
- finest all-around
- florid, blue-eyed
- toughest male
- blocky sandy-haired
- illustrious all-round
- attractive, high-spirited
- natural all-round
- pedestrian or other
- greatest all-round
- tall professional
- healthy professional
- serious female
- puny, pathetic
- magnificent, limited
- lithe, bedraggled
- rock-hard super
- background-professional
- greasy, semi-literate
- outstanding male
- weary masculine
- tough, joyful
- tiny grecian
- lean, large
- often vocal
- sci-professional
- simply heroic
- glib male
- usually muscular
- splendid all-round
- great all-around
- magnificent all-round
- good-natured and genial
- good-looking and capable
- stereotypical illiterate
- young mental
- formerly strong
- greatest all-around
- beefy young
- inquisitive and mischievous
- physically gifted
- rival young
- typical athenian
- thine, young
- harmless female
- more beefy
- clean-cut, blond
- energetic female
- splendid, young
- beautiful bronzed
- famous all-round
- female mathematical
- easy-going, self-indulgent
- mature professional
- ponderous young
- young virile
- clean and noble
- past young
- cunning and fearless
- strong and plucky
- still awesome
- fine all-round
- truly capable
- mature human
- great all-round
- obviously professional
- big stalwart
- pathetically poor
- many collegiate
- splendid all-around
Popular Searches
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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