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 breakdown

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

  • nineteenth nervous
  • full-blown nervous
  • psychotic, total
  • organic momentary
  • total psychotic
  • creative nervous
  • coincidentally synchronous
  • stunning and simultaneous
  • comprehensive nervous
  • general mentational
  • final psychotic
  • final paranoid
  • incipient nervous
  • odd, rare
  • untimely emotional
  • complete nervous
  • complete cognitive
  • complete men\-tal
  • irreversible climatic
  • massive nervous
  • psychological and nervous
  • absolute nervous
  • permanent nervous
  • muh-muh-mental
  • total glandular
  • cataclysmic mechanical
  • careful step-by-step
  • full-scale psychotic
  • irreversible and unrecoverable
  • long-overdue nervous
  • medal nervous
  • old-fashioned nervous
  • resultant occasional
  • clumsy but noisy
  • general post-matrimonial
  • regular temporary
  • anglian telegraphic
  • inevitable and utter
  • ignoble, querulous
  • final and indubitable
  • rapid serious
  • needless and ultimate
  • pathetic emotional
  • average nervous
  • total systemic
  • collective nervous
  • imminent nervous
  • bad nervous
  • total current
  • profound nervous
  • full-scale nervous
  • aesthetic nervous
  • rapid nuclear
  • believable nervous
  • world-class nervous
  • problematic nervous
  • full, embarrassing
  • six-month nervous
  • latest nervous
  • once systemic
  • bloody nervous
  • huge, hysterical
  • sooner physical
  • partial ecological
  • eventual schizophrenic
  • digitalized thermal
  • noisy nervous
  • herbal compound
  • visual schematic
  • total molecular
  • precise phonetic
  • planetary nervous
  • complete men­tal
  • homi­cidal
  • total communicative
  • long-term potential
  • ambulatory nervous
  • nice nervous
  • temporary nervous
  • spectacular nervous
  • wasphysical
  • unequivocal nervous
  • slow atomic
  • utter and everlasting
  • complete dental
  • preliminary statistical
  • early nervous
  • bad, nervous
  • physical nervous
  • nervous or physical
  • sudden or complete
  • awful nervous
  • genuine nervous
  • collective psychological
  • aids-like
  • pathetic mental
  • fourth nervous
  • quiet nervous
  • impending mental
  • catastrophic economic

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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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