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 cause
Below is a list of describing words for cause. 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 cause:
- exact and immediate
- sole formal
- unknown exciting
- unknown and hypothetical
- apparent exciting
- enough probable
- blind, efficient
- direct exciting
- ultimate or ontological
- possible legitimate
- original exciting
- internal unknown
- family frequent
- secret, exciting
- immediate exciting
- worthiest possible
- corresponding and sufficient
- adequate intentional
- perfectly palpable and apparent
- additional and proximate
- adequate or formal
- virtuous but almost desperate
- apparent and flagrant
- true efficient
- weighty and invidious
- official probable
- intelligent efficient
- abiding and unabated
- passionate, good
- powerful exciting
- proximate efficient
- primary homogeneous
- primordial and final
- distinct exciting
- inadequate or partial
- subjective or material
- adequate efficient
- actual exciting
- extraordinary or incidental
- extraordinary and incidental
- frequent exciting
- principal efficient
- fatal and immediate
- self-proclaimed divine
- principal and physical
- internal traumatic
- actual and rational
- visible or ascertainable
- constant exciting
- concurrent external
- efficient and final
- direct efficient
- righteous and unselfish
- directly exciting
- primal or initial
- minor but very real
- natural efficient
- efficient or active
- righteous but unpopular
- reasonable and probable
- sacred german
- particular intelligent
- certain and intelligible
- historically essential
- apparent secondary
- outward efficient
- dirty, vexatious
- department--medical
- efficient or final
- frequent and most fatal
- grand and righteous
- tangible and irritating
- important exciting
- chief efficient
- remote and efficient
- original disturbing
- great and most universal
- important and very evident
- indirect or involuntary
- unusual exciting
- whole, abundant
- righteous and glorious
- great and ostensible
- supremely patriotic
- formal or final
- vast and social
- powerful contributory
- fundamental, persistent
- centuries--principal
- reasonable and manifest
- substantial or permanent
- weak but fascinating
- apparent or rational
- obscure and apparently inadequate
- operative and fruitful
- universal primal
- prime and most effective
- violently exciting
- unnatural ultimate
- reasonable or probable
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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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