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 contortions

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

  • altogether idiotical
  • violent and altogether idiotical
  • incomprehensible reptilian
  • strangest and most demoniacal
  • free and erotic
  • extraordinary snake-like
  • wry and out-of-the-way
  • awkward and powerful
  • ancient geologic
  • cervical and ocular
  • villainous facial
  • simply unnatural
  • alarming and fascinating
  • weird, outlandish
  • ridiculous facial
  • slight facial
  • frantic, helpless
  • swift muscular
  • deceptively languorous
  • ferocious facial
  • massive, inexplicable
  • frightful facial
  • indistinct, weird
  • final facial
  • unnatural facial
  • contemptuous facial
  • sundry grotesque
  • worse tell-tale
  • halfway muscular
  • comical facial
  • absurd convulsive
  • violently facial
  • confusingly rapid and inextricable
  • last and hideous
  • rapid and inextricable
  • confusingly rapid
  • oddest facial
  • hideously savage
  • sundry equivocal
  • expressionless, curious
  • agonizing facial
  • sufficient facial
  • liberal facial
  • many pantomimical
  • insane facial
  • imply involuntary
  • malignant and terrible
  • fleeting and characteristic
  • grotesquely unnatural
  • many facial
  • brief facial
  • idiotic, orgiastic
  • desperate inner
  • inimitable facial
  • violently repressive
  • absurd facial
  • dreadful facial
  • undeniably weird
  • several woebegone
  • familiar, mild
  • horrible muscular
  • former muscular
  • queer and absurd
  • much facial
  • unusual and bizarre
  • ugly facial
  • grotesque facial
  • artificial intellectual
  • inconceivably swift
  • nervous facial
  • less aimless
  • slight painful
  • awful facial
  • oddly graceful
  • extraordinary facial
  • minor facial
  • abnormal and painful
  • strange mutual
  • violent, wrenching
  • mysterious facial
  • impossible acrobatic
  • unusually weird
  • remarkable and hideous
  • secret facial
  • many muscular
  • strange muscular
  • curious vocal
  • violent facial
  • comical physical
  • wildest and most fantastic
  • such facial
  • monstrous, hideous
  • painful and unexpected
  • violent muscular
  • sudden, queer
  • violent involuntary
  • whole violent
  • abrupt, agonizing
  • nomenclatoral
  • strange convulsive

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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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