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 celebrities

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

  • late and only local
  • probably undeserved
  • real and shady
  • prime literary
  • suspicious commercial
  • literary and even social
  • considerable ante-nuptial
  • legal and local
  • certain world-wide
  • extensive and noisy
  • quite indubitable
  • genuine and quite indubitable
  • cooperative cooperative
  • prominent international
  • international global
  • several self-proclaimed
  • international global
  • renowned professional
  • wide and well-founded
  • literary and titular
  • wide and unenviable
  • modern and even contemporaneous
  • skeptical and literary
  • political male
  • academical and forensic
  • cosmopolitan artistic
  • fictitious and counterfeit
  • longer artistic
  • transcendant bibliomaniacal
  • orthodox social
  • adventitious and local
  • western and local
  • pecuniary and patrician
  • dead musical
  • also imperishable
  • worn-out musical
  • mystic and medicinal
  • objectionable literary
  • universal and well-deserved
  • world-wide colossal
  • all-important and individual
  • local and civic
  • well-nigh world-wide
  • local poetic
  • likable local
  • numerous victorian
  • forthright modern
  • history-making global
  • collateral academic
  • real-life subcultural
  • biggest voluntary
  • genuinely weird
  • notorious shoddy
  • recognizable local
  • transient and artificial
  • pregnant single
  • much provincial
  • deceased local
  • brighter and wider
  • such eighteenth-century
  • sad proverbial
  • most bygone
  • temporary, spurious
  • unimportant literary
  • literary or medical
  • more uncensored
  • royal and academical
  • lokial
  • mediocre local
  • certain rakish
  • real and famous
  • somewhat infamous
  • sundry literary
  • deserving equal
  • social and theatrical
  • extensive and universal
  • dim social
  • chief theatrical
  • wide local
  • down minor
  • other full-grown
  • sudden and general
  • globe-girdling
  • new argentine
  • sparkling international
  • favorite and all-around
  • vastly overblown
  • fickle, fleeting
  • other defunct
  • much fatal
  • highest german
  • eminently aristocratic
  • such world-wide
  • few naughty
  • tabloid-style
  • great convivial
  • occasional eccentric
  • several theatrical
  • such cosmopolitan
  • wide european

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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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