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 childhood
Below is a list of describing words for childhood. 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 childhood:
- classically miserable
- similar poverty-stricken
- quiet and most happy
- generally vivid and permanent
- generally vivid
- particularly normal
- miserably religious
- unhappy racial
- innocent, introspective
- piteous, prostrate
- cramped but not unhappy
- miserable and abusive
- happy and relatively uneventful
- usually easy and satisfactory
- precocious, anxious
- pert, precocious
- demure victorian
- singularly happy and trusting
- carefree, enjoyable
- mostly complacent
- relatively solitary
- foolish and far-off
- innocently confident
- hungry, grubby
- desperately humble
- healthy, bread-and-butter
- normally eventful
- singularly happy and unclouded
- already strange and disagreeable
- refined and intense
- tottering and rickety
- unhappy and narrow
- naturally selfish and self-centered
- sorrowful humble
- fiercely careless
- instinctive, happy
- sunny provencal
- vagrant and wayward
- innocent and uneventful
- turbulent but very cheerful
- precocious and neurotic
- wretched, motherless
- eager ebullient
- especially unfortunate or unhappy
- fresh and sensitive
- truly best and dearest
- rather fanciful and fantastic
- barren, inarticulate
- indeed bright and sunny
- cheerful, devout
- drunken weary
- peaceful and promising
- happy, hoydenish
- studious and affectionate
- grave, studious and affectionate
- usually bright and cloudless
- solitary and rather morbid
- real, joyous
- real, rich
- lawless, spontaneous
- alert and beautiful
- gentle sinless
- garrulous, inquisitive
- otherwise miserable and barren
- always vague and hazy
- troubled royal
- lonely dreamy
- ragged and fiercely imaginative
- quaint and wholly exceptional
- unchecked and undisciplined
- ideal, prospective
- freedom-loving, joyous
- joyous, simple
- miniature feminine
- gay, wonderful
- artless and unaffected
- thy tottering
- poor and painful
- hard, poor and painful
- interestingly ecumenical
- desperately teasing
- ly happy and trusting
- fictive, protracted
- naive and real
- simpler, sunnier
- privileged victorian
- submissive, unhappy
- various traumatic
- misguided or underprivileged
- formerly lukewarm
- prim, impeccable
- staggeringly functional
- unquestionably gray
- truly brutal
- healthy and well-rounded
- sullen and miserable
- gothically devout
- presumably miserable
- generic soviet
- quietly miserable
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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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