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 burst

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

  • shorter, milder
  • wild peal
  • brightest solar
  • sudden, sizzling
  • aa local
  • good girlish
  • peasant-general
  • tiny and explosive
  • sweet jocund
  • involuntary and general
  • initial candid
  • samandal
  • final uncontrollable
  • immense incandescent
  • unexpected and overpowering
  • three-round
  • netal
  • short and surprising
  • wide spidery
  • mighty flashy
  • final confidential
  • horrible, unwilling
  • >netal
  • glaringly violent
  • short, directional
  • whole scandal
  • sudden and admirable
  • often longed-for
  • sudden, irregular
  • rude real
  • wild sonic
  • impersonal, ceaseless
  • recent loud
  • indescribable, explosive
  • vociferous and vulgar
  • retaliatory short
  • stunning near-lethal
  • unmistakable irregular
  • separate, explosive
  • instantaneous, stunning
  • precise three-round
  • swift colorful
  • passionate fresh
  • rare and piteous
  • dumb and voiceless
  • strikingly animated
  • short and very furious
  • passionate and rapid
  • sharp and surprising
  • gray yearling
  • thoroughly unusual
  • distant or even nearby
  • immediate and incredibly powerful
  • tremendous but short
  • top jumbo
  • previous rapid-fire
  • traditional purple
  • short, spectacular
  • occasional low-frequency
  • final iridescent
  • untamed, passionate
  • occasional, tiny
  • tense jerky
  • last-ditch, all-out
  • terrible, incandescent
  • accurate three-round
  • little lal
  • towering and monstrous
  • pale, towering and monstrous
  • modest but most satisfying
  • final elemental
  • fourth peal
  • high-pitched, hectic
  • hearty, melodious
  • gratifying and unexpected
  • splendid but [v]ineffectual
  • [v]ineffectual
  • heavy thunder-peal
  • coarse hearty
  • alive, terrific
  • continuous, tumultuous
  • reckless christal
  • irrepressible madcap
  • everlasting and majestic
  • final and splendid
  • awful preliminary
  • grand and sudden
  • arrival and powerful
  • later thankful
  • mad heartbreaking
  • magnificent, triumphant
  • wild, weird and terrible
  • terrific and astounding
  • overpowering melodious
  • low meek
  • general and irregular
  • final, heartbreaking
  • ordinary daring
  • generous breathless
  • again overall

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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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