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 captain

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

  • preposterous ideal
  • five-year-old, dear
  • favorite fat
  • angry and most attractive
  • gallant and discursive
  • boldest or most desperate
  • young but very capable
  • creative and hard-working
  • unseated old
  • strict cold
  • moody good
  • heavy, depressed
  • vastly calmer
  • still unsure and unhappy
  • proud and autocratic
  • unconscious mercenary
  • tall and startlingly handsome
  • brave but unimaginative
  • chical, proud
  • unconscious draconian
  • eager ethiopian
  • abysmal junior
  • unnoticed naval
  • marshal and former
  • coarse and bestial
  • handsome, remote
  • rather sinister but recognizable
  • horrid mad
  • old portugal
  • able, ruthless
  • grand hairy
  • senior byzantine
  • smooth redheaded
  • swarthy, wiry
  • imperturbable, immutable
  • blue-uniformed junior-grade
  • old sinewy
  • uncommon careless
  • yon slippery
  • fascinating bengal
  • imperious, soft-hearted
  • worthy valiant
  • wrinkled young
  • daring and enigmatical
  • urbane and cordial
  • obliging, attentive
  • female mercenary
  • untrained junior
  • brave but not imprudent
  • particularly belligerent
  • scarred, redheaded
  • truculent former
  • certainly gallant
  • close-mouthed, scarred
  • belated arrival
  • vain, renowned
  • swarthy and wiry
  • wise stout
  • austere and aloof
  • irrepressible mercenary
  • black-haired junior-grade
  • exceptionally inefficient
  • cool, implacable
  • foolish, fawning
  • certain finnish
  • lean good
  • vicious, morose
  • complaisant, worthy
  • fat norwegian
  • baldish, broken-down
  • stubborn and silent
  • absolutely vulgar
  • brave and ill-fated
  • fitting, noble
  • gray-haired, scarred
  • colossal pockmarked
  • great renowned
  • energetic spanish
  • sinister but recognizable
  • stiffly professional
  • sceptical medical
  • competent, life-long
  • bumptious naval
  • white warm-weather
  • tall, blond and handsome
  • last, late
  • classic mercenary
  • capable mercenary
  • clever and acquisitive
  • civil and shrewd
  • younger black-haired
  • dangerously paranoid
  • a—a—provisional
  • final demented
  • newest and most junior
  • grizzled swiss
  • local mayan
  • unemployed mercenary
  • mysterious, black-robed
  • polish mercenary

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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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