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 circumstances
Below is a list of describing words for circumstances. 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 circumstances:
- unfortunate concomitant
- stressful personal
- special and rather unfortunate
- accidental favorable
- utterly circumscribed
- infernal social
- rather adverse
- small unlucky
- narrow pecuniary
- terrible, fatal
- odd, unanticipated
- personally awkward
- different but really similar
- exceptional and unforeseen
- unsettled and difficult
- immediate, dangerous
- doubtful and improbable
- unheard-of and wonderful
- typically desperate
- peculiarly fortuitous
- fairly hopeful
- peculiar and horrid
- moderate but comfortable
- merely incidental and unimportant
- relatively identical
- creditable or even glorious
- irritatingly distressing
- accidental or fabulous
- somewhat strange and difficult
- whimsical but eventful
- trivial and apparently coincidental
- formidable and figurative
- painful and clumsy
- ridiculous characteristic
- unforeseen and unfavorable
- distressing and ill-fated
- ordinary and even commonplace
- obscure and ridiculous
- difficult and adverse
- protective and preservative
- fortunate and enviable
- possibly dire
- admittedly peculiar
- graceful, barbaric
- genuinely unforeseen
- familial and economic
- irrelevant, physical
- unique and primitive
- purely accidental and irrelevant
- unusual or perilous
- unforeseen and pleasing
- coercive or suspicious
- particular remarkable
- inauspicious and unpleasant
- normal or legitimate
- various adventitious
- foolish and awkward
- insignificant petty
- surprising or distressing
- previous disgusting
- tragic and savage
- pleasing and eventful
- aretino--political
- whatsoever despicable
- pitiless, degrading
- comparatively untoward
- untoward and degrading
- singular and opportune
- unavoidable and irresistible
- outlying and transient
- exceptionally revolting
- multitudinous accidental
- preternatural and astonishing
- certainly unpleasant
- similarly disagreeable
- trivial and slight
- sufficiently affluent
- tragic and distressing
- peculiarly tragic and distressing
- easy tranquil
- few and apparently trivial
- different and unfounded
- unequal external
- characteristic or adventitious
- abject and distressing
- uncommon incidental
- exceptional and thrilling
- unavoidably ludicrous
- deplorably untoward
- other parenthetical
- such adverse
- less calamitous
- slightly strenuous
- comparatively affluent
- certain conceivable
- such disadvantageous
- true and principal
- monstrous comfortable
- crippling and debilitating
- heart-rending and appalling
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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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