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 certainty
Below is a list of describing words for certainty. 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 certainty:
- dead moral
- clenched and absolute
- instinctive mammalian
- emotionally convincing
- sick and awful
- terrifying, absolute
- hideous and instinctive
- terrible subconscious
- galling, bitter
- still stronger and genuine
- stronger and genuine
- characteristic crystal
- primitive and illogical
- absolute professional
- deep and unshakeable
- single horrid
- definite, haunting
- unaccountable but instantaneous
- awful flaming
- sure, sick
- uncanny, inescapable
- former blithe
- unquestionable and immediate
- sweet, prophetic
- solemnly sweet and grave
- startling and mournful
- absolute statistical
- absolute, historical
- brave youthful
- cold, german
- tragically cold
- sick, taut
- obscure and unscientific
- nearest mathematical
- dumb despairing
- routine and most positive
- full subjective
- virtually mindless
- weird and distressing
- unexplainable dead
- unspoken gloomy
- immediate and placid
- flat, absolute
- dreadful, instinctive
- serene, eternal
- sudden unsettling
- sudden obstinate
- queer disheartening
- swift unalterable
- confident, radiant
- bleakly stubborn
- dreadful cunning
- mildly arrogant
- full, unshakable
- grim and mournful
- stark unbearable
- sudden ontological
- sudden, gruesome
- dreadful instinctive
- self-assured unrelenting
- absolute and utterly inevitable
- former unemotional
- jovial and robust
- vital, consistent
- mute, haunting
- fatal and luminous
- swift, pained
- strongest subjective
- evident intelligent
- positive and triumphant
- vast, glad
- moral or mortal
- fine serene
- terrible and speedy
- commonplace historical
- calm and propitious
- impersonal unquestionable
- practical dead
- old uncanny
- secret, horrible
- mysterious but complete
- downright abiding
- grim, inevitable
- unerring and mechanical
- early exhilarating
- steady, habitual
- vivid and indestructible
- horrible, overwhelming
- stark heavy
- impartial cruel
- equal absolute
- mature, defiant
- absolute immoral
- half-way comfortable
- tardy and unerring
- passionately longed-for
- tangible beautiful
- equal and unerring
- almost documental
- crudely decisive
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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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