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 contrasting
Below is a list of describing words for contrasting. 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 contrasting:
- glaring and hilarious
- own small-time
- strikingly refreshing
- stark and erotic
- striking and delightful
- sick, jagged
- grainy and low
- incredibly grainy and low
- incredibly grainy
- pleasant and striking
- strange and even awful
- startling, welcome
- abrupt and fascinating
- quite antipodal
- great but pleasing
- deliciously sarcastic
- striking and wholesome
- complete and most charming
- strangest and prettiest
- strangely terrible
- recurrent and violent
- complete and stark
- oddly startling
- oddly startling and charming
- violent, gut-wrenching
- sharp and flattering
- always sharp and bitter
- strange and glaring
- painful or sudden
- humiliating and bitter
- strong chromatic
- unexpected and bizarre
- strong and very pleasing
- definite modern
- sadly unfavorable
- final or perfectly sharp
- refreshingly sharp
- striking and total
- extraordinarily weird
- sorry, sordid
- glaring and offensive
- startling and interesting
- noble and instructive
- strong and pleasing
- stark and noisy
- ancient, compelling
- sharp and appealing
- alarmingly stark
- sharp, baffling
- sharp, demonic
- dramatic, organic
- startling, unconscionable
- perversely intentional
- stark and startling
- sharp but tolerable
- often comic
- dazzling and superb
- singular but magnificent
- striking and cheerful
- unimpaired instructive
- sardonic and repulsive
- useless and fanciful
- astonishingly cool
- suggestive and piquant
- violent and voluptuous
- full but amicable
- pleasing dramatic
- unbearably glaring
- almost diametrical
- violent and glaring
- mournful and even ludicrous
- striking and perhaps interesting
- striking and most pleasant
- gloomy disturbing
- strange and almost majestic
- exquisite, exciting
- fantastical and absurd
- sharp and vividly dramatic
- strikingly happy
- striking and comfortable
- sharpest apparent
- yellow and pleasing
- hence impressive
- impassable, abysmal
- sharp and incongruous
- singular and not unattractive
- remarkable and advantageous
- common and admirable
- direct and strongest
- significant botanical
- largest and most decisive
- singular and most curious
- immediate and pathetic
- grievous and startling
- direct flagrant
- acute and bizarre
- visible, absurd
- intoxicating, maddening
- analogous sexual
- bitter and depressing
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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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