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 communication
Below is a list of describing words for communication. 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 communication:
- successful voiceless
- diplomatic rapid
- direct telegraphic
- reliable and instantaneous
- available direct
- separate and subsequent
- universal and instantaneous
- imply verbal
- short but most interesting
- constant telegraphic
- milder but ambiguous
- competent verbal
- eerie nonverbal
- sole planetary
- nearby telepathic
- universal and rapid
- sudden and apparently incidental
- still clear and direct
- cryptic & clandestine
- serious telepathic
- fortnightly postal
- significant confidential
- permanent and ample
- closest diplomatic
- still telegraphic
- largely confidential
- constant, free
- distant and expeditious
- difficult and easily defensible
- verbal confidential
- dull one-sided
- enough hand-held
- brief but direct
- everyday silent
- perhaps linguistic
- easy and frank
- practical two-way
- relevant and intelligent
- weak low-power
- widely erratic
- spurious and widely erratic
- clumsy verbal
- longest direct
- intense but unspoken
- human two-way
- unofficial, unreported
- unsatisfactory oral
- arid dependable
- instantaneous, long-distance
- physical, gestural
- visual or symbolic
- practicable lateral
- bitter wireless
- intentional and effectual
- perpetual telegraphic
- amicable public
- terrible typewritten
- unofficial and irregular
- coarse and intrusive
- electro-psychological
- closer and quicker
- longed-for official
- perfectly practical and business-like
- safe and short
- free ambassadorial
- gracious and most welcome
- vocal and sympathetic
- corrupt or rotten
- quickest and most dependable
- practicable and advantageous
- sad and confidential
- rapid postal
- telegraphic
- instantaneous interstellar
- complex telepathic
- grudging private
- efficient superluminal
- slow interstellar
- total underwater
- littleverbal
- two-way verbal
- modern telegraphic
- uninhibited internal
- voiceless mental
- intensive interactive
- perfect two-way
- fastest dependable
- humiliating and cryptic
- vaguely humiliating and cryptic
- easy last-minute
- same nonlocal
- nonverbal supplementary
- preliminary telepathic
- air-to-ground telegraphic
- conscious and welcome
- hisses—plainly intelligible
- incomprehensible, private
- accurate, honest
- genuine interspatial
- such workable
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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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