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 cell

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

  • spare neural
  • massive voltaic
  • single epidermal
  • ventral canal
  • newer but still simple
  • pyramidal apical
  • optically sensitive
  • filthy original
  • single apical
  • grim domed
  • simple voltaic
  • anterior forked
  • available cortical
  • damned unchanging
  • still dependent
  • mobile but still dependent
  • dank, squalid
  • lonely lunatic
  • vivid and luminous
  • single pyramidal
  • cold two-room
  • squalid and nauseous
  • voltaic or electrolytic
  • blue solar
  • dark gritty
  • full poor
  • different curtained
  • foolishly fanciful
  • dank, fearful
  • large untenanted
  • hard and gloomy
  • usually separate and distinct
  • solitary sordid
  • central tetrahedral
  • single, apical
  • single vegetative
  • large internodal
  • narrow and dreary
  • characteristic pyramidal
  • oblong fertile
  • smaller sterile
  • desirable voltaic
  • little, unwholesome
  • miserable unhealthy
  • single bacterial
  • old commie
  • definite apical
  • self-contained environmental
  • male germinal
  • voltaic
  • primitive bacterial
  • small and perfectly dark
  • concrete hot
  • humblest intestinal
  • empty monastic
  • avid antibody-producing
  • antibody-producing
  • fatly bacterial
  • cold secretive
  • ovarian and renal
  • main hot
  • own conspiratorial
  • foul-smelling little
  • frequently windowless
  • allegedly empty
  • bare, circular
  • air-conditioned bulletproof
  • imperial terrorist
  • sixth and smallest
  • narrow dank
  • definitely glandular
  • asexual special
  • close fetid
  • ignominious dreary
  • blackest and narrowest
  • yon grateful
  • primitive cylindrical
  • windowless pyramidal
  • primordial protoplasmic
  • perfectly dry and free
  • narrow and loathsome
  • sensitive inorganic
  • molecular voltaic
  • similar pre-existing
  • linguistic simple
  • lone and narrow
  • persistent basal
  • pericentral
  • triangular retinal
  • externo-medial
  • human primordial
  • large or median
  • discal or median
  • outer apical
  • thyridial
  • ordinary epidermal
  • rough, white-washed
  • same protoplasmic
  • cosy, padded
  • unknown, private

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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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