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 construction
Below is a list of describing words for construction. 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 construction:
- marvelously unified
- unsocial and uncanny
- remotely orthodox
- scandalously shoddy
- regular and wonderfully complex
- extremely complex and regular
- commonest and most literal
- cumbersome german
- superficially simplistic
- primitive and yet marvelous
- unwarrantable and unauthorized
- beautiful or exquisite
- complete and artificial
- grievously fragile
- exquisite and grand
- hazardous gothic
- proper stable
- complex initial
- careless orbital
- deliberately sensual
- fair and obvious
- apparently bolder
- amusingly opposite
- efficient and dependable
- certain pliable
- great and vile
- high and sturdy
- twofold grammatical
- actual indirect
- signal heavy
- unbroken practical
- rectangular sectional
- limited and old-fashioned
- splendid nebular
- absolutely simple and straightforward
- simplified, classic
- strict or liberal
- liberal and beneficial
- actual canal
- intricate but entirely precise
- entirely precise
- casual geometric
- careful but uninspired
- self-subdual, charitable
- self-subdual
- amazingly stout
- eternally busy
- entirely metallic
- quaint and obsolete
- deep-sea traditional
- stupid antique
- primitive but ample
- brutally literal
- often lame and imperfect
- awkward literary
- rude or plain
- peculiarly broad and shallow
- complex and regular
- peculiar anatomical
- compact and geometric
- heavy and hybrid
- wonderfully intricate and delicate
- solid and neat
- frail and flat
- rather frail and flat
- frequent adverbial
- simplest and most sober
- mystical or allegorical
- smooth and careful
- generous but entirely erroneous
- architectural and naval
- mere conceptional
- somewhat harsh or obscure
- defective and leaky
- irish grammatical
- distinctively wooden
- timbered doric
- solid but ostentatious
- strictest literal
- plausible and commonplace
- metallic artificial
- bleak chaotic
- altogether smoother
- clever architectural
- alarmingly powerful
- jolly solid
- solid traditional
- wide poetical
- extravagant but pointless
- immense, mind-boggling
- expensive, endless
- unlimited german
- circular prefab
- lighter top
- huge, lacy
- recent and far weaker
- strangely organic
- huge and awe-inspiring
- literal, strict
- loathsome metallic
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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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