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 conditions
Below is a list of describing words for conditions. 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 conditions:
- economic, commercial and religious
- seasonal and geographic
- absolutely perfect and unchanging
- favorable agricultural
- adverse climatic
- blustery atmospheric
- unusual harsh
- unfavorable climatic
- unusual and highly fortuitous
- unfavorable economic
- drowsy, half-conscious
- endemic cultural
- negative external
- disabled physical
- limp and unpromising
- oppressed and unequal
- psychologically unstable
- impossibly stormy
- momentary helpless
- bizarre hypothetical
- natural ordinary
- better climatic
- thoroughly overwrought
- him--elemental
- commercial and religious
- free or servile
- arrogant and unilateral
- depressed, depraved
- receptive local
- sufficiently dismal
- suitable climatic
- decent hygienic
- favorable climatic
- climatic and meteorological
- unequal modern
- intense, other
- excellent physical
- biologically easy
- partially defensible
- now onerous
- terribly bedraggled
- partially rudimentary
- variable and partially rudimentary
- far rudimentary
- public non-competitive
- ideal or millennial
- abject animal
- unusual or previously unknown
- decent physical
- constant balmy
- dazed and crumpled
- maximum cold
- present disheveled
- typical mid-atlantic
- previous exalted
- harsh climatic
- steady nervous
- polar climatal
- fatal respiratory
- genial climatic
- wretched, miserable and unhappy
- organic and practically insuperable
- lower and animal-like
- favorable hygienic
- fevered and irritable
- inorganic or physical
- good and constitutional
- special climatic
- desolate and abject
- better optic
- gaudy but very poor
- intolerable and impracticable
- previous electoral
- necessary meteorological
- blind and tangled
- desperate economic
- good physical
- poor healthier
- female neutral
- highly fortuitous
- markedly poorer
- new and rightful
- surprising psychical
- injurious or unnatural
- sane or sensible
- soon commercial
- correspondingly uncertain
- pestilential social
- deplorable physical
- conceivable prospective
- insane, well-armed
- ordinarily favorable
- painfully wide-awake
- social and climatic
- reversible sterile
- anemic economic
- powerless and dependent
- intolerable local
- current obedient
- intriguing and rare
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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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