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 conversation
Below is a list of describing words for conversation. 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 conversation:
- entire forthcoming
- increasingly esoteric
- heretofore simple
- fully private
- suddenly meaningful
- angry, animated
- good and reasonably cheerful
- uninterrupted, private
- swift, low-pitched
- stilted, polite
- oddest four-sided
- intelligible and enjoyable
- constitutionally honest
- previously lighthearted
- polite and laborious
- mandatory polite
- important masculine
- aftermeal
- carnal and unprofitable
- sometimes equivocal
- deep and strict
- gaily bawdy
- meal and discreet
- delightfully luminous
- curious and unintelligible
- idle and diffuse
- apparently interesting
- sparkling, cheery
- easual
- gentle, elliptical
- well-informed and most technical
- somewhat franker
- continuous and sublime
- interesting after-dinner
- largely one-sided
- insubstantial and agonizing
- exactly fluent
- breezy, sparkling
- visible inaudible
- intensely uninteresting
- long and intensely uninteresting
- little affable
- desultory and automatic
- pompous after-dinner
- brief intelligible
- strange voiceless
- public two-way
- quiet, unheard
- innocently clerical
- amusing but quite needless
- esoteric, philosophical
- mysterious, unreal
- nonstop, one-sided
- historic and clandestine
- brilliant and almost sublime
- cheerful but quiet
- pious and familiar
- profane or frivolous
- overtly innocuous
- rather ponderous and serious
- once more and pleasant
- inevitable civilized
- long and most informative
- lighthearted french
- practical real-time
- aesthetic-philosophical
- presumably cynical
- further desultory
- impassioned or emphatic
- facetious and very intelligent
- cool and yet terrible
- short and very interesting
- short but eager
- unchecked and open
- little desultory
- polite after-dinner
- animated and rational
- suddenly interesting
- final, pathetic
- loud and sometimes incoherent
- endless, inane
- witty and wry
- preliminary and entirely meaningless
- spirited, private
- routine polite
- often awkward and tedious
- ingeniously courteous
- serious, heartfelt
- sober and peaceable
- instructive and cheerful
- crisp and decisive
- worth and interesting
- penetrating general
- popular commonplace
- humorous and interesting
- funny, one-sided
- casual general
- agreeable, instructive
- animated legal
- purse--philosophical
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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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