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 characteristics
Below is a list of describing words for characteristics. 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 characteristics:
- gliding--special
- unusual orbital
- outward sexual
- useful and most agreeable
- desirable dominant
- outer formal
- inexplicable minor
- distinct neandertal
- desirable and superior
- smooth, wavy
- primal and analogous
- other and highly important
- japan--special
- --histories--physical and psychic
- --histories--physical
- physical or sentimental
- unsophisticated and amiable
- revolution--principal
- elementary but distinctive
- resins--external and superficial
- resins--external
- treasury--personal
- respect--real
- unique and variable
- otherwise great and striking
- disagreeable prominent
- superlatively salient
- vote--special
- cumulative vote--special
- earlier unique and picturesque
- earlier unique
- beef--general
- frizzled, general
- hardy genetic
- certain three-dimensional
- considerable individualistic
- old agreeable
- striking and amiable
- enough avian
- certain worrisome
- grossly apparent
- notable or distinctive
- salient physical
- away spatial and temporal
- away spatial
- special somatic
- eminently animal
- literary and qualitative
- own, typical
- faith--physical
- bad faith--physical
- incontestable, dimensional
- distinctive and dominant
- necessary, immutable and eternal
- essentially distinct and opposite
- sometimes superhuman
- chief labor-saving
- peculiar and often unique
- mental or pathological
- german and personal
- mechanical or quantitative
- uncanny and coercive
- undoubtedly racial
- physical and special
- especial and gratifying
- symbolical or sacred
- geochemical and atmospheric
- rough, wretched
- lower, distinctive
- external racial
- disagreeable racial
- stern personal
- austere and rather unlovable
- prominent and enviable
- cruel or ignoble
- singular maritime
- intimate, polish
- curious and profoundly dissimilar
- cautious and painstaking
- outstanding personal
- more simian
- other behavioral
- purely ancient
- evident certain
- dengal physical
- definite mammal
- optimal sexual
- same perceptive
- naturally clumsy
- impressive, anatomical
- essentially predatory
- obvious technical
- simian facial
- racially important
- racially important and inescapable
- climatic, agricultural and industrial
- evident racial
- i>thermal
- social or aesthetic
- dominant or submissive
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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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