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 blues

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

  • subterranean homesick
  • garish, uninhibited
  • formal and serene
  • vibrant electrical
  • real jamaican
  • indeed red and blue
  • ill-fated true
  • inevitable pale
  • constitutional true
  • brassy, sassy
  • lonesome homesick
  • green, occasional
  • wooded, dim
  • ole down-home
  • naked true
  • slow, jazzy
  • middling prominent
  • unsettlingly alien
  • gallant municipal
  • dreadful, unhealthy
  • dusky moss-covered
  • mostly muddy
  • good-night, admiral
  • yellow, exotic
  • admiral bluewater--admiral
  • midwestern preppy
  • colossal unwieldy
  • post-modern deconstructed
  • wonderful, translucent
  • fairy opal
  • lilac, dark
  • deeper, bottomless
  • pale and genial
  • green--inconceivably ethereal
  • full and deeper
  • grey and brighter
  • royal true
  • brilliant clear
  • green and iridescent
  • smooth tropical
  • indeed red
  • formal imperial
  • cool solid
  • great opaque
  • impressive crisp
  • taller smoother
  • green and pastel
  • finest true
  • purple, richest
  • awesome jamaican
  • habitual dark
  • best, jamaican
  • cheap violent
  • odd signal
  • purple, deep
  • female fake
  • soft, blurry
  • coarse threadbare
  • crisp formal
  • little whirling
  • orange and rich
  • fantastic, free
  • ethereal eggshell
  • nervous, silky
  • \~shoal
  • full-throated, late-night
  • black sickle
  • black and vibrant
  • sumptuous and simple
  • gray and sometimes cloudy
  • black, several
  • canadian true
  • soft indefinite
  • especially mineral
  • especially pale
  • green and unknown
  • tentative watery
  • such metallic
  • magnificent and colossal
  • mild, sorrowful
  • more streamlined
  • slow sexy
  • three-mile distant
  • old radioactive
  • misty autumnal
  • loyal true
  • richly blended
  • best dark
  • past true
  • fierce, intense
  • large jamaican
  • weak and ill-defined
  • grand true
  • little-town
  • rugged, rough
  • rich undersea
  • old uncompromising
  • chicago-style
  • especially purple
  • angry and incoherent

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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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