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 context
Below is a list of describing words for context. 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 context:
- acceptable cosmic
- responsible, high-stakes
- larger biological
- wider regional
- solid and businesslike
- same grammatical
- global, galactic or universal
- galactic or universal
- social victorian
- political and commemorative
- maybe envious
- actual cosmic
- dramatic historical
- elegant, civilized
- positive societal
- immediately social
- sizzling, scintillating
- identical musical
- new pragmatic
- specific dialectical
- political cause-and-effect
- nonracial
- proper astronomical
- suitable editorial
- strategic and geographic
- social, civilized
- proper alien
- literal, theological
- politically realistic
- determinedly rational
- modern “cultural
- proper interpretative
- particular, modular
- interesting modular
- melodramatic metaphysical
- seemingly mimetic
- admittedly alien
- logical and creative
- primarily oral
- plausible historical
- inconceivably futuristic
- new, participatory
- total historical
- altogether pictorial
- ideological and institutional
- non-linear, vague
- climatic biological
- current pragmatic
- homogeneous cognitive
- external, irrelevant
- wrong cultural
- higher emotional
- totalistic
- great, dramatic
- emotional or logical
- political and theoretical
- believably human
- proper ideological
- entire somatic
- organ\-izational
- later linguistic
- broad pragmatic
- specific pragmatic
- ideal or real
- serious and formal
- wholly fictional
- realistic social
- rather broader
- racist social
- nonlegal
- non-contractual
- nonspatial
- consensual sexual
- own interpretative
- physical and technical
- other pragmatic
- much cultural
- simple, narrow
- psycho-historical
- coherent, rational
- visually stunning
- strictly metaphysical
- familiar sexual
- own abnormal
- appropriate cultural
- same unsavory
- sophisticated galactic
- different pragmatic
- familiar social
- original sacred
- essentially emotional
- strongly dramatic
- true cultural
- wider literary
- vast and dreadful
- private and intimate
- old empirical
- cultural or historical
- precise and formal
- natural and cultural
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
