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 buildings
Below is a list of describing words for buildings. 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 buildings:
- expensive showy
- grander and taller
- quirky alien
- shabby industrial
- bewilderingly similar
- rectangular beige
- stark disagreeable
- colored auxiliary
- relatively grandiose
- lesser, older
- narrower, tall
- interesting civic
- towering, untenanted
- low drab
- many blocky
- blocky black-and-white
- white hemispherical
- gray cramped
- impressive, permanent
- wonderful ecclesiastical
- exquisite collegiate
- great blacked-out
- newer public
- colossal octagonal
- vaguely shabby
- proportioned new
- marvelous vintage
- roundly conical
- immense hexagonal
- academic and residential
- abominable unfinished
- least seductive
- gorgeous lighthearted
- tall, white-walled
- main wooden
- geometric inverted
- dark and blocky
- main monastic
- seemingly unharmed
- tallest and costliest
- small and fantastic
- pleasing colonnaded
- hence tall
- larger civic
- secular governmental
- distant colonnaded
- modular military
- high, filthy
- taller new
- tall, tile-roofed
- ancient, windowless
- older, shabby
- creakily picturesque
- old and creakily picturesque
- grimy, industrial
- one-story prefab
- past three-story
- sad and graceful
- original one-story
- daring and gaudy
- ruinous or dangerous
- beautiful and stately public
- overcrowded, obsolete
- handsome public
- unmarked, unlabeled
- old and unneeded
- blocky but gaily colored
- taller modern
- handsome modernistic
- several three-story
- historically noble
- low, decrepit
- thick-walled permanent
- empty, unnecessary
- gaudy, empty
- outlying administrative
- hospital and nearby
- low-slung cinder-block
- now dark and disturbing
- heavy neoclassical
- many world-renowned
- other ramshackle
- largest martial
- beautiful municipal
- beautiful monastic
- arsenal, public
- interesting and historically important
- principal secular
- also smoky
- strong and specious
- apartments--principal
- private apartments--principal
- fascinating monastic
- ruinous great
- five-story flat
- older and cheaper
- capacious, irregular
- substantial and not unornamental
- flimsy meretricious
- stately public
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.
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