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 caution
Below is a list of describing words for caution. 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 caution:
- critical and exquisite
- penetrating and stinging
- aside instinctive
- habitual and rather pathetic
- excessive and unreasoning
- frenzied and even fantastic
- grim, cold-blooded
- canny, instinctual
- overwhelming normal
- apologetic but unyielding
- slow ingrained
- promising due
- almost solicitous
- deliberate and wholesome
- sinuous and noiseless
- nice and nervous
- impassioned and affectionate
- equal quiet
- mere charitable
- innate swedish
- normal common-sense
- preferred unnecessary
- habitual and suspicious
- significant magisterial
- evident infinite
- almost ignoble
- unremitting but perhaps misguided
- ancient but wholesome
- life-long selfish
- anxious, extreme
- present and great
- legitimate, much
- characteristic diplomatic
- old much
- customary intrepid
- native conscientious
- sceptical military
- brief but usual
- unremitting, scrupulous
- edible but very great
- anxious and suspicious
- edifying and useful
- extreme and apprehensive
- aside legal
- equally vigilant and commendable
- extreme and prudent
- habitual and official
- stubborn and malicious
- perhaps prudent and commendable
- perhaps prudent
- tiresome and ridiculous
- utmost monetary
- exasperated past
- extreme diplomatic
- practised particular
- nevertheless extreme
- selfish, practical
- still wakeful
- careful, native
- sullen, wary
- sudden similar
- certain unobtrusive
- particular intuitive
- almost paranoid
- preferred excessive
- pre�ternatural
- extreme, tactical
- enormous instinctive
- equally thoroughgoing
- certain ostentatious
- last muffled
- hence extra
- coolly selfish
- usual legendary
- dark, extra
- always extreme
- imminent and extreme
- bright, greater
- customary scientific
- swift and emphatic
- certain, much
- true cat-like
- apparently judicious
- present, extreme
- instinctive and subtle
- true woodland
- instructive and profitable
- apparent equal
- more obsessive
- cool and fearless
- great, excessive
- greatest negative
- equally vigilant
- just native
- much slow
- utmost
- most commendable
- careful, stealthy
- quasiregal
- same ingrained
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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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