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 collection
Below is a list of describing words for collection. 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 collection:
- sorriest old
- skinny, unshaven
- impressive civic
- comprehensive and fascinating
- vast and intensely interesting
- neatest and most comprehensive
- disappointingly thin
- finest assorted
- psychologically desperate
- shaky and psychologically desperate
- avid and systematic
- already outstanding
- truly miscellaneous
- vague, heterogeneous
- small but priceless
- european earliest
- specialized and almost useless
- stunning and embarrassing
- rather stunning and embarrassing
- extensive and quite valuable
- small worldwide
- vast tiny
- effective and honest
- noble and very extraordinary
- small but most interesting
- banal and doubtful
- recent mammal
- nitely protracted
- outstanding ornithological
- decidedly miscellaneous
- similarly drab
- magnificently useful
- excellent archaeological
- large but indifferent
- splendid numismatic
- large and very miscellaneous
- comprehensive, worldwide
- national pharmaceutical
- exquisite topographical
- limited zoological
- numerous and unsurpassed
- apparently miscellaneous
- already unsurpassed
- peaceable and continuous
- meaningless gaelic
- almost tribal
- peace-loving and law-abiding
- complex, atonal
- random individual
- valuable numerous
- admittedly erotic
- ghoulish and fearsome
- eclectic and electric
- defective and discontinuous
- comprehensive and well-rounded
- valuable and inexhaustible
- prettiest and most complete
- extensive psychical
- rich numismatic
- comically stiff and formal
- comically stiff
- gigantic biographical
- unusually large and excellent
- accurate and very beautiful
- immodest and charming
- famous and most wonderful
- large and startling
- fairly cagey
- famous and extensive
- interesting and large
- anthropomorphological
- great anthropomorphological
- incomplete private
- vociferous, discordant
- incomparable anatomical
- indeed extensive
- indeed extensive and valuable
- richest entomological
- literary and artistical
- cheap and safe
- large and rather miscellaneous
- enormously diverse
- authentic, total
- miscellaneous and extensive
- arbitrary and one-sided
- newest and most complete
- basically uncomfortable
- otherwise definitive
- puny and chaotic
- own concentric
- comprehensive and outlandish
- somewhat sparse
- slim but wonderful
- impossibly harmonious
- family archival
- tremendously enjoyable
- fascinating and tremendously enjoyable
- rough and unwashed
- noticeably rough and unwashed
- puzzling, unimpressive
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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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