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 colleagues
Below is a list of describing words for colleagues. 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 colleagues:
- persistent younger
- unfortunate disabled
- elder professional
- dear and former
- least cordial
- self-serving, ambitious
- wary and yet unwary
- impossibly naive
- still tutorial
- disreputable or useless
- material, dear
- human academic
- particular former
- well-fed former
- former senatorial
- handsome recalcitrant
- ideal and valuable
- radio-astronomical
- prestigious senior
- naughty, clever
- brazen, dreamy
- many supportive
- mutually waterlogged
- earthbound medical
- slightly junior
- jealous, stuck-up
- junior scholastic
- never younger
- brown, nondescript
- uncertain, suspicious
- longtime academic
- talented and supportive
- deranged former
- strangely compatible
- sallow older
- provincial or manorial
- like-minded patrician
- stupendous female
- outwardly discreet
- often ministerial
- your late
- extremely gentle and mild
- subtle and unreliable
- almost disgruntled
- arsenal, dear
- honorable and even noble
- eloquent but erratic
- perplexed, envious
- able but too aspiring
- equally capable and courteous
- younger physiological
- cautious, well-trained
- 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
- late chinese
- vehement and implacable
- temporarily disordered
- taller and slighter
- initially hostile
- vicious and unworthy
- less egalitarian
- understandably emotional
- considerate, charming and open-minded
- desirable and clear-headed
- charming and open-minded
- knowledgeable and co-operative
- morose and quiet
- inexperienced, uncontrollable
- equally morose and quiet
- notably unmartial
- altogether unsuspecting
- probably unbalanced
- pugnacious and unreasonable
- pretentious and probably unbalanced
- atheistic scientific
- temporary inferior
- least sanguine
- active equal
- slightly senior
- shorter and fatter
- misguided but well-intentioned
- somewhat shorter and fatter
- rotten, unpatriotic
- professional and esoteric
- incompetent and untrustworthy
- welcome, beloved
- more publicity-conscious
- sometime lower-level
- closest parliamentary
- pleasant and hardworking
- arrogant erstwhile
- lifeless, open-mouthed
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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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