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 both
Below is a list of describing words for both. 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 both:
- fast charming
- pious and thankful
- exhilarating and painful
- utterly repugnant
- certainly legal
- mainly inaccessible
- languidly weak
- other, animate
- hospitably gracious
- more resistive
- quietly unpacked
- profoundly enamored
- simultaneously striking
- long slighted
- inalienable minimum
- bestial and chemical
- particularly gracious and condescending
- secretly indignant
- glad and sorry
- entirely absent
- greatly beholden
- cold lost
- endlessly jagged and devious
- endlessly jagged
- unhurried, surprising
- savage, naked
- brisk and torrid
- sentient, male and female
- well ready
- somber and hopeful
- honourably characteristic
- keenly enthusiastic and sympathetic
- keenly enthusiastic
- breezy and agreeable
- warm and animate
- truly misleading
- generally deficient
- top goal
- wonderful and foolish
- provisionally dry and severe
- provisionally dry
- terrifying and childlike
- childlike and splendid
- grand and ignoble
- cavalier and simple
- greatly damaging
- practically upended
- gladly forgone
- catlike and serpentine
- wonderful jocose
- tall and unusually striking
- esoteric ritual
- traitorous and foolish
- mistrial and fine
- cloudy covert
- great scandal
- possibly weary
- successfully energetic
- excessively angry
- disappointingly weak
- obviously fallacious
- especially abhorrent
- wholly devoid
- well-paid official
- undoubtedly popular
- once indicative
- warmly fenced
- dextrous and skilful
- contrary and similar
- general favorite
- eminently exact
- affectionate, enchanting
- afterwards watchful and solicitous
- afterwards watchful
- acceptable sovereign
- useful and wasteful
- therein dreary
- whole, advantageous
- beautifully visible
- thrice fairer
- supremely disdainful
- proud and supremely disdainful
- rosy and grey
- undoubtedly due
- open and wonderful
- powerful unclothed
- false and fawning
- human, intriguing
- fine and disreputable
- clearly surprising
- chief, famous
- deeply wrong
- indiscriminate, impassable
- quickly disabled
- semiautomatic, ready
- equally old and genuine
- sick and sleepy
- darkly motionless
- perfectly simple and true
- ample, flaming
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
