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 complaint
Below is a list of describing words for complaint. 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 complaint:
- frequent subjective
- gentle, rhetorical
- horrible anomalous
- generalized, desultory
- deep-seated recondite
- violent pulmonary
- distressing nasal
- unreasonable and groundless
- sudden, thin
- continual thy
- common and often unsuspected
- sober, pathetic
- furious and absurd
- constant but bearable
- cranky verbal
- general or serious
- incessant, harsh
- dreary, low
- least venereal
- palpably unfair
- sober pathetic
- strange and very terrible
- hysterical and rhetorical
- undefined but convenient
- menacing and more
- universial
- obscure gynaecological
- minimal, obligatory
- vain unjust
- distressing and almost universal
- painful and internal
- specially portuguese
- vain effeminate
- same after-dinner
- distressing and usually fatal
- single inflammatory
- fearful and often fatal
- constant and indignant
- unknown and painful
- inexcusable, sterile
- incurable spinal
- passionate and well-known
- ridiculous and romantick
- concrete or definite
- similar unreasoning
- distressing and inconvenient
- distressing chronic
- burlesquely pathetic
- public and most grievous
- formal and moderate
- malignant internal
- distressing and most frightful
- distressing female
- distressing and most agonizing
- virulent feminine
- private and sometimes public
- detestably insidious
- mired--general
- long-standing nervous
- frequent but most painful
- pained, passionate
- boyish defiant
- sullen monotonous
- spinal or hysterical
- mild and trifling
- mysterious eighteenth-century
- invariable and reasonable
- inward wishful
- vast and vain
- final vehement
- former loud
- apparent dropsical
- querulous and pitiful
- dreary, desperate
- bad venereal
- monotonous deluded
- painful, troublesome
- querulous, vicious
- mild and humorous
- same pulmonary
- small chronic
- serious and well-founded
- same juvenile
- shrill rasping
- incurable internal
- stormy and violent
- cruel and loathsome
- main specific
- incurably chronic
- old bronchial
- weak, hoarse
- good concerted
- loud and uncomplicated
- officious and spurious
- myreal
- official verbal
- hundredth such
- mild, female
- high, continuous
- loud-voiced, piteous
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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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