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 card
Below is a list of describing words for card. 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 card:
- rectangular credential
- active wild
- dusty, dim
- latest and most deceptive
- daily postal
- public wild
- infectious wild
- undetermined wild
- complete wild
- stationary flat
- conversational wild
- huge episcopal
- last postal
- routine green
- stiff, rectangular
- basic adherent
- ultimate wild
- neat postal
- burned-out wild
- secret wild
- mere unmarked
- full seventy-eight
- manual key
- white smart
- independent wild
- smudged, wrinkled
- discreet magnetic
- plainest and most impressive
- troublesome eighth
- same standby
- lucky, yellow
- clever yellow
- blank formal
- inactive and out-of-date
- distinctly inactive and out-of-date
- distinctly inactive
- ominous pink
- rather dirty and crumpled
- large olive-green
- last unsuspected
- inspiring postal
- lowest or available
- dummy, such
- especially unexpected and disappointing
- especially unexpected
- iridescent and gilded
- positively iridescent
- positively iridescent and gilded
- daily memorial
- simple but puzzling
- grimy postal
- dirty postal
- such highest
- lowest or lower
- such fourth
- highest indifferent
- original lowest
- plain hand-written
- crumpled, shabby
- suddenly top
- saucy postal
- elusive wild
- alternately hot and cold
- alternately hot
- new wild
- promising white
- drunk and more
- reply-postal
- experimental postal
- highest or lowest
- probably professional
- full wild
- german wild
- paranoid yellow
- picture-postal
- _postal
- unnecessarily high
- down key
- latest wild
- odd personal
- terminal brown
- military wild
- two-inch rectangular
- dirty handwritten
- green optimal
- invitation-only straight
- complimentary key
- offleial
- old, spotty
- genetic wild
- succinct and unnecessary
- paratively weak
- plastic-covered, striped
- next clean
- blank flexible
- next, necessary
- fake green
- damn wild
- white, gilt-edged
- important, nice-looking
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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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