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 author
Below is a list of describing words for author. 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 author:
- national bestselling
- capital and grand
- acute and often profound
- now rich and famous
- secret and most guilty
- gigantic, rumpled
- literate and eloquent
- diligent and respectable
- characterless old
- spirited and sentimental
- famous and epigrammatic
- largely repulsive
- controversial and largely repulsive
- now bestselling
- award-winning bestselling
- national best-selling
- classical or ecclesiastical
- truly royal and noble
- unhappily deceased
- scholarly western
- standard practical
- moral and majestic
- fearless and public-spirited
- blasphemous and bloody-minded
- visibly wretched
- judicious, ingenious
- youngest and weakest
- favorite unfashionable
- socialist and best-selling
- wonderful, bestselling
- last english-language
- prolific bestselling
- now-obscure
- ancient and now-obscure
- sometimes unsurpassed
- charitable and courteous
- malicious but very graphic
- talented and increasingly popular
- immortal but unpopular
- versatile modern
- ingenious and highly gifted
- favorite and gifted
- indigent and indignant
- actual narrative
- painstaking and penurious
- best-selling spanish
- deceased norwegian
- athenian, athenian
- industrious and scrupulously painstaking
- french homosexual
- elegant and miscellaneous
- undoubtedly talented
- historical and andecdotal
- etymological, historical and andecdotal
- vile perfidious
- superlatively eloquent
- superlatively eloquent and able
- eminent but decayed
- bestselling
- popular clerical
- ingenious and unfortunate
- worldwide bestselling
- respectably honest
- controversial feminist
- internationally bestselling
- hideously automatic
- charming, hard-drinking
- mature, swarthy
- invisible and perhaps nonexistent
- single twentieth-century
- internationally unknown
- perishable dyspeptic
- domestic standby
- sole and unassisted
- classic and fluent
- spanish tragic
- anonymous and highly authoritative
- pre-war best-selling
- severe and realistic
- frank, joint
- young, joint
- sad imperial
- deistical or republican
- easy gay
- total and undivided
- erudite cuban
- imaginary moorish
- exciting or suggestive
- anonymous chinese
- conservative, polemic
- exquisitively sophisticated
- alarmingly silent
- famed and renowned
- thoughtful and forceful
- eminent arboricultural
- voluminous and highly popular
- disproportionately grateful
- prominent dramatic
- onely obscure
- sensible and observant
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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