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 beacon

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

  • small lifelong
  • full-sized orbital
  • ordinary homing
  • fatally ruddy
  • capricious and sullen
  • flaming and ephemeral
  • invisible, spectral
  • completely unidentifiable
  • distant aural
  • steady ruddy
  • distinct directional
  • pale and sinister
  • definitive homing
  • imperial homing
  • optic homing
  • uninhabited asteroid
  • beautiful vibrant
  • once welcome
  • clear crimson
  • simple homing
  • internal homing
  • warm buttery
  • black, pyramidal
  • precise, narrow
  • continuous crimson
  • blue navigational
  • yellow, man-made
  • nice homing
  • regular homing
  • tiny ultrasonic
  • remarkably stable and benevolent
  • different fake
  • small radioactive
  • ultimate homing
  • compact signal
  • elementary, no-frills
  • better homing
  • inconsistent and far-off
  • slightly self-pitying
  • psychic navigational
  • efficient and necessary
  • dark, numerous
  • brilliant, welcome
  • northern trigonometrical
  • homing
  • defiant blue
  • compact short-range
  • constant red
  • gational
  • brilliant, distant
  • dim intermittent
  • unwholesome red
  • stable and benevolent
  • biggest portable
  • cheapest interstellar
  • bright eternal
  • cool, mellow
  • damn great
  • small homing
  • little infrared
  • pale, bloated
  • familiar celestial
  • single, unchanging
  • active homing
  • sweet heady
  • bright but distant
  • grim red
  • ever brighter
  • far bright
  • wholesome red
  • own dazzling
  • strange telepathic
  • single orbital
  • tiny blinking
  • new outer
  • dim golden
  • little auxiliary
  • omnidirectional
  • farthest southern
  • powerful automatic
  • distant signal
  • super\-natural
  • big triangular
  • weird yellow
  • directional
  • little automatic
  • thy pale
  • somewhat confusing
  • huge and terrible
  • navigational
  • pale clear
  • vast alien
  • narrow, pale
  • small blinking
  • blinking red
  • remarkably stable
  • chilly white
  • sweet new
  • faint pink
  • brilliant emerald

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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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