Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 confidence

Below is a list of describing words for confidence. 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 confidence:

  • placid and complacent
  • humble but fearless
  • sudden and seemingly easy
  • weak and overweening
  • businesslike and cheery
  • full and filial
  • manifest full
  • former, full
  • former unsuspecting
  • vain and incautious
  • mystical and even irrational
  • such cheeky
  • former blithe
  • desires--mutual
  • human desires--mutual
  • mutual and blind
  • indiscreet and unbounded
  • mutual and wholesome
  • entire and sweetest
  • full and impudent
  • such implicit
  • terribly perceptive
  • strange, unshakable
  • intrusive and unsolicited
  • seeming enthusiastical
  • strong unconquerable
  • translucent perfect
  • joyful, perfect
  • seeming consummate
  • conscious and lofty
  • complete and empty
  • lofty and steady
  • utter, insane
  • unmistakable but modest
  • again arrogant
  • haughty and immense
  • avowedly exclusive
  • false luxurious
  • already unbounded
  • apparent shy
  • now--professional
  • absolute loving
  • lively reciprocal
  • calm and unsuspecting
  • calm and triumphant
  • joyous, brave
  • other implicit
  • enormous imperturbable
  • enthusiastic and thoughtless
  • feigned drunken
  • fullest mutual
  • smug self-destructive
  • similar eerie
  • great and correct
  • unbounded and flattering
  • vague and reckless
  • cunning and more
  • original airy
  • heedless and serene
  • absolute cool
  • unspoken, total
  • unbounded, childlike
  • full and implicit
  • complete and joyous
  • henceforth complete
  • blind and inept
  • vain carnal
  • strong and blind
  • manifest special
  • presumptuous, vain
  • empty heretical
  • long-standing and hereditary
  • perfectly mutual
  • legislative, public
  • proud dauntless
  • entire, eternal
  • abiding and unbounded
  • overweening and ill-founded
  • much natty
  • chief and most complete
  • guileless, happy
  • entire and unflagging
  • absolute and reciprocal
  • absolute and unrestrained
  • pert and playful
  • bold unclouded
  • high, spontaneous
  • deep, unswerving
  • habitual and tranquil
  • careless and insolent
  • implicit
  • complete and quiet
  • public and departmental
  • rather overweening
  • high, tremendous
  • friendly quiet
  • bloodless, passionate
  • perfectly intoxicated
  • calm, metallic
  • closest and most secret

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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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