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 black
Below is a list of describing words for black. 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 black:
- cold, glorious
- untrained and unknown
- strong and very gifted
- loud, thin
- quite pale and haggard
- brown lusty
- principal rumanian
- poor courageous
- observant benedictine
- above-mentioned, extraordinary
- notorious, anti-union
- second filial
- big gallant
- certain runaway
- loud or old
- real militant
- plain bluish
- stable virtual
- feisty new
- once-proud and arrogant
- militant and most secret
- bitter but brilliant
- famous and absolutely legendary
- satirical and often humorous
- odds-on favorite
- peculiar and occasionally useful
- sacred and most secret
- hostile or angry
- top grafted
- semi-criminal, shiftless
- glossy bluish
- modern and literal
- rich bituminous
- electro-chemical, egyptian
- big orchestral
- brown rusty
- temporary virtual
- clever and old
- best dangerous
- brave but helpless
- terrible and relentless
- vigorous middle-aged
- warm, straight
- most generous
- many mammoth
- quite pale
- hard stiff
- wal, old
- wide and stormy
- scandalous little
- tall, fierce
- chaotic neutral
- long defunct
- soft french
- famous sacred
- poor runaway
- famous chief
- nice, snug
- most notorious
- fine full-grown
- tiny old
- good dirty
- great heraldic
- familiar modern
- old wise
- warlike and turbulent
- tall and thin
- smaller, weaker
- thin short
- opposite lower
- old disabled
- semi-criminal
- next major
- honest, intelligent
- invisible but powerful
- powerful little
- easy and simple
- new and alien
- original ancient
- little and little
- good tough
- good-natured old
- tall, white-haired
- mysterious little
- compact little
- old cold
- late admiral
- best italian
- great chief
- beautiful black
- less frequent
- new and better
- old canadian
- new official
- tall, lanky
- more militant
- thin old
- once-proud
- more strange
- much further
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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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