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 conceptions
Below is a list of describing words for conceptions. 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 conceptions:
- doubtful miraculous
- rude and loose
- erratic and tangled
- teleological general
- clearest and most life-like
- clearest and quickest
- possible and rational
- starkly horrific
- intimate and strong
- conventionally sentimental
- sufficiently generic
- common, narrow-minded
- culinary or moral
- boyish ill
- horrific and impossible
- primary mythological
- puny and individual
- ready-made moral
- special pictorial
- rigid, morose
- comprehensive possible
- vulgar and most frequent
- ancient and dogmatic
- broad, international
- mad and fantastic
- popular and historical
- expressive and terrible
- poetical and almost prophetical
- beautiful, expressive and terrible
- almost prophetical
- indistinct, indefinite
- largest strategical
- separately incomprehensible
- present and ever victorious
- exclusive and separately incomprehensible
- indispensable and fundamental
- antagonistic typical
- vast and philosophic
- perfectly plain and honest
- fundamental romantic
- absurd and unfit
- intense ideal
- preposterous private
- supernatural and sublime
- spiritual, supernatural and sublime
- fresh and fuller
- illegitimate symbolic
- older and firmer
- unworthy and narrow
- shadowy platonic
- virile and daring
- deficient, mechanistic
- legitimate pictorial
- material and undeveloped
- primitive rational
- symbolic and realistic
- finest and happiest
- strange, immaculate
- else dim and vague
- womanly irrational
- panoramic and single
- lofty but proper
- new sidereal
- number--geometrical
- pragmatic and evolutionary
- rude and false
- false and banal
- equally shallow and unworthy
- shallow and unworthy
- powerful and veracious
- stringent and grand
- antique ciceronian
- imperishable romantic
- genuine hebraic
- poor perfunctory
- awe-inspiring and unalterable
- naive and horned
- huge poetical
- modern ideal
- grotesque tragi-comic
- pleasant and incomplete
- unscriptural and pagan
- restrictive, stereotypical
- new, epoch-making
- grandiose personal
- vague but haunting
- dim and tawdry
- rhetorical and technical
- sacred structural
- dim and seeming
- transcendent and immanent
- empirical, general
- equally clear and distinct
- crudest and most vulgar
- pregnant innate
- inconsequential and vain
- unwritten, traditional
- lofty jewish
- time-honored traditional
- harmonic melodious
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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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