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 attempted
Below is a list of describing words for attempted. 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 attempted:
- automatic but pointless
- futile belated
- valiant but vain
- imprudent and desperate
- long and ultimately unsuccessful
- abrupt, panicky
- desperate and nearly hopeless
- never literary
- appallingly unsuccessful
- messy, convoluted
- doubly hazardous
- slight and very ineffectual
- cynical and deliberate
- maurice--ineffectual
- paradoxically pathetic
- frenzied but honest
- remarkable evolutionary
- mately successful
- rude and immature
- private and most audacious
- fruitless and presumptuous
- denial or futile
- stupid apoplectic
- listless unsuccessful
- sole and feeble
- frenzied, useless
- obvious and clumsy
- admittedly noble
- surprising last
- tsar--ineffectual
- late abortive
- double nocturnal
- daring and fraudulent
- weak and quite ineffectual
- evident desperate
- wonderfully hopeless
- devastatingly direct
- heartless or brutal
- weak but continual
- pathetically hopeless
- final transcendental
- latest miserable
- furious last-second
- oddly penurious
- hollow and transparent
- vain and impracticable
- extraordinarily transparent
- abortive saramfal
- extremely nice and hazardous
- polite but futile
- legitimate and gallant
- solitary and fruitless
- similar but unsuccessful
- sweetest painful
- quite monstrous
- feeble and perfunctory
- heartless, futile
- well-informed or accurate
- outstandingly well-informed
- outstandingly well-informed or accurate
- persistent and insane
- demented subrational
- recent, illegal
- impetuous secret
- all-out and desperate
- futile but uncontrollable
- casual, desperate
- desperate and almost successful
- bold and most violent
- oblique and entirely unjustifiable
- unexpected brave
- asia--piratical
- direct and infamous
- epical or literary
- pre-eminently vile
- systematic or considerable
- thorny, dangerous
- bold, statesmanlike
- skillful, vigorous and persistent
- dreadful and convulsive
- feeble, perverse
- honest and thoroughgoing
- endless and puerile
- visionary and wild
- certain plebeian
- sad abortive
- scientific, prewar
- ill-advised and blasphemous
- vain and foolishly heroic
- foolishly heroic
- temporarily vain
- regrettably successful
- quite natural and human
- tense and immediate
- furious eternal
- gallant and miserable
- fevered, fiendish
- occasional, casual
- increasingly futile
- serious but unsuccessful
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
