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 characters
Below is a list of describing words for characters. 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 characters:
- morning--principal
- picturesque moral
- general obligatory
- solemn and even tragical
- rather vain and frivolous
- secondary sexual
- apocryphal or mythological
- swampy and inhospitable
- recrossing--geological
- archaic unfunny
- bold and uncommon
- just principal
- civic or public
- secondary masculine
- lovable, picturesque
- wholesome private
- infuriating but fascinating
- mythological twentieth-century
- amazingly repulsive
- high and flawless
- fiery and austere
- combative and restive
- indifferent specific
- definitely public
- transparent and yet deep
- general irresponsible
- naturally savage and untrained
- savage and untrained
- sharply individual
- excellent universal
- excellent specific
- mythical, fictional
- feasible and enormously profitable
- customarily imperishable
- previous chaste
- almost avaricious
- trivial and treacherous
- obscure and exceptional
- humanitarian and disinterested
- egyptian figurative
- simple, lifelike
- intensely retail
- desultory and unfinal
- boldest and most precipitous
- useless specific
- already strong and brutal
- never major
- violent, glaring
- lukewarm and abortive
- sacred and sacerdotal
- forlorn and awe-inspiring
- otherwise practical and sensible
- most unforgettable
- primordial hairy
- peculiarly definite and obvious
- peculiarly insidious and malignant
- enlightened and altogether admirable
- descriptive or metaphorical
- notoriously bad and immoral
- capricious or whimsical
- wholly unidentifiable
- pleasantly weird
- cheap and every-day
- deep, intricate
- uniformly uninteresting
- embarrassingly hostile
- similar variable
- smarmy well-dressed
- pterylological
- finest purest
- well-respected and scrupulously honest
- perceptible general
- perennial, infinite
- strangest and most puzzling
- healthy and abiding
- simply humorous
- ruinously disgraceful
- dangerous and possibly fatal
- straightforward and sincere
- always noble and generous
- chivalrous and somewhat eccentric
- inhospitable and unprofitable
- dubious and unhappy
- imaginary or historical
- hopelessly mundane
- coarse and modern
- shabby, unstable
- singular and often undesirable
- memorable comic
- so-called generic
- wolfishly practical
- agicultooral
- revolutionary and incredible
- circular or compensatory
- new extraterrestrial
- slick and insidious
- hideous and evil
- otherwise well-developed
- perplexing and incomprehensible
- familiar and indelible
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
