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 comparison
Below is a list of describing words for comparison. 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 comparison:
- scientifically exhaustive
- appropriately disgusting
- envious or bitter
- perhaps advantageous
- inverted and foolish
- feminine subtle
- best mundane
- thoughtful and subtle
- small-office
- complacent invidious
- favorable invidious
- entirely faulty
- legitimate relative
- vivacious and simple
- true and rather apt
- psychopathologically important
- more inapt
- perfect philological
- impartial anatomical
- invidious pecuniary
- straightforward digital
- alone equal
- constant and involuntary
- large and exact
- careful, selective
- shallow nor metaphorical
- direct, parallel
- unnecessary and insidious
- careful and large
- playfully literal
- constant subconscious
- constant, sore
- delicate conscious
- natural but unspoken
- incomplete double
- critical, laborious and honest
- wholly inept
- spitefully prophetic
- most unfavorable
- invidious or odious
- endless corrective
- decidedly infelicitous
- similar unflattering
- still untrained and untried
- inevitable and rather attractive
- strikingly favorable
- perpetual and standard
- invidious and unnecessary
- fancy, startling
- manifest invidious
- degrading and obscene
- finally constructive
- highly interesting and illuminating
- different and self-contained
- intrinsically different and self-contained
- exact and sincere
- apparent invidious
- odious and egotistical
- action--general
- superficial utilitarian
- microscopic and stylistic
- rather inapt
- cool or judicious
- exact or direct
- grave and circumspect
- worked-out but true
- cleverly worked-out but true
- cleverly worked-out
- perpetually interesting
- fanciful or imaginative
- real similar
- undoubtedly stupid
- unpleasant zoological
- unwilling and surprising
- brief, favorable
- rough and superficial
- sufficiently unfortunate
- splendid and original
- startling and not inappropriate
- fine-drawn and fallacious
- odd picturesque
- perhaps deceptive
- tacit further
- laborious visual
- general quantitative
- altogether superficial
- largest and most general
- strange and unfitting
- necessary arithmetical
- violent and odious
- impartial and fair
- equally unsafe
- trite and coarse
- careful and broad
- aforementioned constant
- thorough anatomic
- chronic shakespearian
- poetical, humorous
- somewhat far-fetched
- conscientious and impartial
Popular Searches
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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