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 buffalo

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

  • also juicy
  • surprisingly small and weak
  • excellently tanned
  • romantic and rather unsuccessful
  • true snowy
  • partly tanned
  • tanned and partly tanned
  • spare upper-middle-class
  • sacri­ficial
  • stupid ferocious
  • bold but harmless
  • three-year-old fat
  • finest dark-haired
  • mostly transient
  • white, female
  • always plentiful and fat
  • male two-year-old
  • huge, bleached
  • short and nutritious
  • miserable broken-down
  • splendid snow-white
  • brown, scrawny
  • enjoyable and successful
  • sometimes numerous
  • short, juicy
  • old single-shot
  • wildest african
  • ragged, unlined
  • last romantic
  • freshly grilled
  • immense, shaggy
  • powerful wild
  • black bovine
  • surprisingly small
  • nicely tanned
  • softest and finest
  • rich and nutritious
  • always plentiful
  • exciting and successful
  • sturdy male
  • proud brown
  • same top
  • extra spicy
  • few captive
  • darker black
  • once abundant
  • huge, blind
  • thin, shaggy
  • curved, black
  • several exciting
  • big solitary
  • old run-down
  • soft tanned
  • remarkably fat
  • old shaggy
  • enormous hairy
  • fat and juicy
  • biggest and tallest
  • rather unsuccessful
  • rich and plentiful
  • real wild
  • enraged wild
  • old solitary
  • wild german
  • rough and tangled
  • shaggy, unkempt
  • thick and hard
  • great, wild
  • shaggy, black
  • white female
  • wild, black
  • great, warm
  • short dry
  • fine male
  • shaggy black
  • huge, shaggy
  • single brown
  • fierce and fearless
  • wicked red
  • great warm
  • short, crisp
  • tanned
  • hamstrung
  • three-year old
  • fierce wild
  • -cal
  • plain, every-day
  • huge shaggy
  • apparently lifeless
  • angry old
  • short, strong
  • nice sweet
  • great horned
  • huge dead
  • old tattered
  • thick, short
  • real interesting
  • great wild
  • monstrous white
  • single-shot

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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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