Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 clan

Below is a list of describing words for clan. 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 clan:

  • lucky galactic
  • maternal communal
  • zoltral
  • vintage colonial
  • little matrilineal
  • proud seafaring
  • proud and reclusive
  • remarkable generous
  • nameless, red-handed
  • entire nasty
  • partiarchal
  • tenal
  • imperial dynastic
  • prestigious human
  • impassive chief
  • originally totemic or other
  • warlike southern
  • maternal familiar
  • own exogamous
  • particular totemic
  • decidedly uncooperative
  • large, long-established
  • frustrating and contentious
  • angry and stiffnecked
  • estgal
  • pamdal
  • mihkal
  • wicked, crooked
  • judicial and literary
  • wide satanic
  • female exogamous
  • indigent and subordinate
  • miscellaneous or half-blood
  • ancient and extremely dishonest
  • small, dominant
  • precarious and suspicious
  • rather precarious and suspicious
  • rollicking, faulty
  • innumerable and never-ending
  • genuinely sociable
  • goodly ambrosial
  • eminently responsible
  • agreeable sicilian
  • powerful and not over-loyal
  • infernal and avenging
  • ancient and rather disreputable
  • obsolete african
  • highly formalized
  • ancient and disreputable
  • originally totemic
  • similar totemic
  • grim and speechless
  • haughty patrician
  • noble elder
  • next attainable
  • appropriate elder
  • family whole
  • small virtuous
  • long-lived, tough
  • cautious and canny
  • once great and vigorous
  • large close-knit
  • insidious japanese
  • moderate, responsible
  • kindred turkish
  • younger and unimportant
  • obnoxious and eternally pushy
  • eternally pushy
  • utterly cruel
  • big mute
  • messy, ornery
  • particularly impractical and useless
  • tight, close-knit
  • strongest and proudest
  • noisy chinese
  • proud and prestigious
  • high fairy
  • southernmost, largest
  • proud, deceitful
  • original iraqi
  • same dysfunctional
  • prominent and extremely wealthy
  • few krystal
  • old inborn
  • powerful predatory
  • totemic or other
  • warlike and singularly successful
  • totemic exogamous
  • multitudinous composite
  • noble well-bred
  • social protective
  • less noteworthy
  • complex, rich
  • extremely dishonest
  • small untoward
  • exogamous
  • whole current
  • foul, irish
  • wisest, best
  • large, far-flung

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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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