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 balance

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

  • true ecological
  • uneasy stand-off
  • new and again successful
  • momentary unstable
  • indigenous ecological
  • perfect dynamic
  • excellent feline
  • workable ecological
  • manageable ecological
  • again successful
  • normal glandular
  • exact and perilous
  • small but miraculous
  • marvelous metabolic
  • present ecological
  • nice national
  • healthy ecological
  • precarious electrical
  • youthful, unstable
  • careful and uneasy
  • apparent or formal
  • previous comfortable
  • local ecological
  • nervous, greasy
  • imperfect and fallacious
  • real or allegorical
  • positive galactic
  • necessary ecological
  • same glandular
  • delicate, hard-won
  • pre-war favorable
  • better global
  • steady, happy
  • original biochemical
  • shaky, day-to-day
  • approximate fifty-fifty
  • incqual
  • delicate sociopolitical
  • perfect pneumatic
  • potent rational
  • unchecked diocesan
  • complete polar
  • usual non-partisan
  • complex ecological
  • original harmonious
  • delicate economic
  • proper and exacting
  • temporary, dynamic
  • youthful hormonal
  • abnormal endocrine
  • delicate hydrostatic
  • yearly adverse
  • diverse genetic
  • proper glandular
  • delicate gravitational
  • mad precarious
  • new, eclectic
  • eco­logical
  • consequent hydrostatic
  • vast unerring
  • continually favorable
  • good and practically useful
  • delicate and highly artificial
  • healthful constitutional
  • lamentably trifling
  • already tentative
  • precise and exquisite
  • pre-war naval
  • appropriate trial
  • occasionally unsettling
  • odd and occasionally unsettling
  • individual glandular
  • disturbing precarious
  • unpleasant and highly delicate
  • corporate expendable
  • delicate faceless
  • always precarious
  • practical and practically invisible
  • female hormonal
  • essential metaphysical
  • elementary ecological
  • own hair-trigger
  • delicate incalculable
  • delicate, precarious
  • primitive entomological
  • _tonal
  • exciting but difficult
  • continuous trial
  • essential and intricate
  • steady conservative
  • inherent and perfect
  • equitable and happy
  • decidedly unstable
  • delicate, haphazard
  • quite intelligible and simple
  • already uneven
  • perfect longitudinal
  • antithetical, fantastic
  • correct trial
  • delicate climatic

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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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