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 copy
Below is a list of describing words for copy. 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 copy:
- unwieldy electronic
- fine uncut
- beautiful unique
- priceless but imperfect
- final fair
- pretentious, cheaper
- clean uncut
- official hard
- unread clean
- dog-eared last
- careful phonetic
- pale protoplasmic
- single gratis
- complete transparent
- heavy and obsolete
- gilt, fine
- huge and tattered
- stark, official
- vocal or hard
- shoddy, spurious
- entirely uncut
- journal, official
- exact and therefore lifeless
- slightly shrunken
- moderately skillful
- perhaps fresher
- larger or perhaps fresher
- portable hard
- gilded leather-bound
- commemorative hard
- illegal bootleg
- tolerable and intelligent
- quite tolerable and intelligent
- quaintly modish
- tallest extant
- abbreviated and frequently unreliable
- famous palestinian
- mechanical exact
- sumptuous and peculiar
- ragged but very good
- imperfect and surreptitious
- dull and pale
- finer and unsophisticated
- perfect and unusually fine
- customary full
- grainy bootleg
- autonomous sentient
- dreadful and lethal
- flawless false
- medical hard
- quick fair
- final clean
- exquisitely faithful
- old and shoddy
- top hard
- precious tattered
- electronic or hard
- seventh fair
- screamingly reluctant
- disposable and screamingly reluctant
- clean remote
- small but minutely accurate
- surreptitious fair
- dog-eared, much-thumbed
- spurious and erroneous
- industry--capital
- local industry--capital
- short but satyrical
- rare broadside
- capital and faithful
- excellent, large
- customary morocco-bound
- faithful and genuine
- languid and colorless
- merely slavish
- breezy miniature
- typographically intact
- ancient and dog-eared
- tame and heartless
- beautiful, well-bound
- vellum, unique
- frightfully imperfect
- vellum, fine
- more uncorrected
- fine and desirable
- magnificent, vellum
- completely uncut
- glorious and perhaps matchless
- perhaps matchless
- unreal and joyless
- evidently inaccurate
- fine and almost invaluable
- white and genuine
- clean and desirable
- beautifully white and genuine
- gloriously genuine
- beautifully fair and perfect
- indifferent and imperfect
- small, unbound
- ancient bilingual
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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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