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 canvasses
Below is a list of describing words for canvasses. 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 canvasses:
- colossal impressionistic
- powdery soft
- perilously heavy
- nightly short
- open oiled
- finest oiled
- curiously resilient
- universal blue
- cunningly curved
- colorful historic
- beautifully empty
- blank, stark
- permanent sombre
- coarse and preposterous
- huge eight-by-ten
- bland hazy
- vast and richly textured
- cheap but striking
- coarse absorbent
- plain, manageable
- unfinished, frayed
- overall biological
- short and balanced
- weighted and sheeted
- cheap rotten
- charred and soggy
- neutral blank
- tough quilted
- new, bleached
- standard-issue bleached
- brand-new blank
- spotless snow-white
- thin-soled white
- broad or tempting
- large eclectic
- full-length virgin
- single unfinished
- heaviest brown
- necessary seamless
- white, unprepared
- aforesaid capacious
- inadequate temporary
- large impressionistic
- ingeniously colored
- ready and vivid
- ever ready and vivid
- flat booming
- cloudy pseudo-classical
- immense and dreary
- crudely splotched
- noteworthy and promising
- stout, close-knit
- next dingy
- fresh silken
- once taut
- portable, collapsible
- worn-out and quite worthless
- white and idle
- notable and valuable
- mere garish
- unfinished fifth
- black and forlorn
- once blank
- dingy, smoke-stained
- cloudless yellow
- wide coarse
- otherwise miraculous
- material, blue
- policies-theoretical
- tough upper
- sizable blue
- dark-blue thin
- wrap-around white
- taut whitened
- stiff iced
- quickly removable
- heavy padded
- short, limp
- swift, maximum
- charred and dirty
- vast variegated
- broad cosmological
- sterile blank
- triple thick
- good, absorbent
- partial black
- large, gray and brown
- tan plain
- temporal and cyclical
- onrushing plain
- clumsy pyramid-shaped
- new immaculate
- small sombre
- taut heavy
- new and snowy
- thoroughly snug
- coarse and flimsy
- flaccid and empty
- historical or classical
- wide fine
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.
