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 capability

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

  • poor regulatory
  • little clairvoyant
  • overall medical
  • sheer, frightening
  • better round-the-clock
  • extraordinary defensive
  • extraordinary technological
  • substantial deep-space
  • intact medical
  • direct dial
  • physiological and intellectual
  • complete nuclear
  • devastating retaliatory
  • relative strategic
  • personal nuclear
  • sufficient road-building
  • mum reproductive
  • full first-strike
  • significant nuclear
  • self-renewal
  • limited self-renewal
  • far-ranging interstellar
  • natural but extraordinary
  • clever, dainty
  • limited offshore
  • fully useful
  • personal and exceptional
  • rapid ascensional
  • miraculous medical
  • tremendous latent
  • intercontinental nuclear
  • secret interior
  • animated physical
  • covert, paramilitary
  • greater offensive
  • enough antimissile
  • strong air-to-air
  • current exploratory
  • unbelievable technological
  • broader therapeutic
  • unlimited therapeutic
  • complete on-board
  • much retrieval
  • nuclear-reprisal
  • nuclear underwater
  • sub\-luminal
  • superluminal and sub\-luminal
  • short-range net
  • superior net
  • state-of-the-art, night-vision
  • super-technological
  • limited paramilitary
  • partial operational
  • full opera�tional
  • high-level secret
  • full night-vision
  • active anti-missile
  • best missile-defense
  • massive computational
  • night-vision and infrared
  • macho, gung-ho
  • asymmetric destructive
  • excellent first-strike
  • last-minute defensive
  • full supervisory
  • maximum operational
  • earthly scientific
  • extreme and unscrupulous
  • limited predictive
  • greater dynamic
  • aggregate military
  • infinite, priceless
  • more long-range
  • sufficient defensive
  • sexual or reproductive
  • literally inhuman
  • full operational
  • amazing medical
  • full evolutionary
  • more computational
  • low reflective
  • full aerial
  • much medical
  • minimal defensive
  • full interstellar
  • full-neural
  • opera�tional
  • considerable secondary
  • massive technological
  • real knock-down
  • active antimissile
  • extensive cold-storage
  • better predictive
  • incredible defensive
  • enough environmental
  • good technological
  • awesome, frightening
  • habitual nervous
  • farthest human
  • purely divine

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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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