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 colleague
Below is a list of describing words for colleague. 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 colleague:
- persistent younger
- unfortunate disabled
- dear and former
- self-serving, ambitious
- impossibly naive
- material, dear
- particular former
- former senatorial
- handsome recalcitrant
- ideal and valuable
- prestigious senior
- brazen, dreamy
- mutually waterlogged
- slightly junior
- junior scholastic
- brown, nondescript
- longtime academic
- deranged former
- sallow older
- like-minded patrician
- outwardly discreet
- your late
- subtle and unreliable
- arsenal, dear
- eloquent but erratic
- able but too aspiring
- younger physiological
- affectionate scientific
- peppery, beloved
- single younger
- testy blond
- own ophthalmic
- leaky, gossipy
- chief and able
- ill-starred medical
- good and very faithful
- legitimate and equal
- vehement and implacable
- taller and slighter
- vicious and unworthy
- understandably emotional
- desirable and clear-headed
- knowledgeable and co-operative
- inexperienced, uncontrollable
- notably unmartial
- probably unbalanced
- pretentious and probably unbalanced
- temporary inferior
- active equal
- shorter and fatter
- somewhat shorter and fatter
- professional and esoteric
- welcome, beloved
- sometime lower-level
- pleasant and hardworking
- lifeless, open-mouthed
- unflappable, pleasant
- anxious soon-to-be
- popular former
- uncommunicative new
- legitimate consular
- uncollegial
- equally ill-fated
- imperious and masterful
- fortunate british
- anonymous southern
- insignificant or troublesome
- unaffiliated
- beloved and able
- inexperienced and incompetent
- capable and vigorous
- equal and independent
- sick human
- illustrious academic
- one-time academic
- overly honest
- hapless political
- dangerous and unreliable
- able and affectionate
- visible and sensuous
- somewhat intoxicated
- somewhat untrustworthy
- able and beloved
- former diplomatic
- faithful and dependable
- old mercenary
- shorter female
- highly elated
- inflexibly honest
- estimable and worthy
- infamous new
- senior missionary
- cool and prudent
- handsome and gifted
- austrian diplomatic
- humble and unworthy
- old and crafty
- sole female
- somewhat dense
- loyal and honest
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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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