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 biographer
Below is a list of describing words for biographer. 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 biographer:
- friendly malignant
- accurate and amusing
- inquisitive would-be
- humble rival
- recent venerable
- eloquent and acute
- unctuously pious
- quaint and affectionate
- circumstantial and chronological
- anonymous and contemporary
- able but too partial
- accurate, italian
- quaint, kindred
- substantially honest
- fullest best
- chief polish
- caustic or humorous
- appreciative and elegant
- well-informed contemporary
- fond and grateful
- last and most popular
- painstaking and generous
- famous and immortal
- idle french
- latest and most exhaustive
- conscientious and indefatigable
- potentially successful
- loving and appreciative
- reliable contemporary
- penetrating and sympathetic
- real businesslike
- last ingenious
- also unworthy
- honest but credulous
- great epicurean
- able and artful
- benevolent and affectionate
- wholly sympathetic
- generally judicious
- intelligent and acute
- latest good
- sole original
- best and most recent
- humane and intelligent
- laborious and conscientious
- shrewd and cautious
- often inaccurate
- thorough and painstaking
- earliest reliable
- latest and most complete
- best and most trustworthy
- latest and fullest
- great rhetorical
- mere plain
- somewhat questionable
- careful and precise
- poor, feeble
- most successful
- less loyal
- rather prim
- able and faithful
- recent critical
- recent french
- principal french
- latest and best
- exceedingly poor
- dutiful and affectionate
- earliest extant
- late excellent
- able and interesting
- far abler
- last and best
- principal german
- panegyrical
- more resolute
- mere general
- more authentic
- more illustrious
- anonymous
- great literary
- highly imaginative
- fondest
- conscientious
- last and greatest
- earliest
- contemporaneous
- gossipy
- veracious
- solemn old
- monkish
- more adequate
- appreciative
- latest
- leviathan
- semi-official
- chronological
- own best
- contemporary
- enthusiastic
- own official
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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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