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 creation

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

  • ongoing serial
  • deformed and abortive
  • anomalous and accidental
  • extravagant and purely imaginative
  • ever ambiguous
  • baseless and unstable
  • courageously mad
  • faultless and sober
  • latest extravagant
  • nonbio-logical
  • fine and intricate
  • continuous and simple
  • lovable and delightful
  • you--individual
  • cbemical
  • resultant dainty
  • active and artificial
  • fragmentary, inadequate
  • breathtakingly wide
  • peaceful feathered
  • already monstrous
  • deliberate and wicked
  • binary avian
  • awesome, temperamental
  • compact, well-designed
  • dangerous and aberrant
  • successful fictional
  • enigmatic and grandiose
  • organic and metamorphic
  • fiendish, terrifying
  • wild perpetual
  • perfectly indigenous
  • pure and gross
  • courageously mad and daring
  • special or sudden
  • virile, untamed
  • mechanistic and fortuitous
  • lower animate
  • unique and new
  • entirely unique and new
  • projective diversified
  • unnatural, abnormal
  • separate and divine
  • sudden, special
  • miraculous and complete
  • primal dark
  • wholesale supernatural
  • deeply wild
  • whole rightful
  • dumb lifeless
  • inanimate or non-moral
  • elegant, simple
  • beautiful, stupendous
  • whole animal
  • delicate, powerful
  • whole animate
  • strangest and most secret
  • never indiscriminate
  • pedestrian little
  • arrogant, brilliant
  • primary or cosmic
  • relentlessly restless
  • real, deliberate
  • chaotic, neurotic
  • horribly sublime
  • precipitous, musical
  • derivative or secondary
  • all-powerful literary
  • false and altogether indefinable
  • loving literary
  • absolute and systematical
  • imaginary and shadowy
  • vivid ready-made
  • minor and most infinitesimal
  • seldom languid or careless
  • seldom languid
  • most aesthetic
  • glorious and incessant
  • sudden or special
  • sublime musical
  • facile and spontaneous
  • grandest artistic
  • magnificent humorous
  • myriadal
  • special and majestic
  • powerful but somewhat unpleasant
  • tyrannical and barren
  • powerful, artificial
  • immediate, supernatural
  • inferior and irresponsible
  • sensitive and gracefully aristocratic
  • gracefully aristocratic
  • artistic, harmonious
  • static and final
  • arbitrary, independent
  • special and unrelated
  • fruitless or experimental
  • direct or miraculous
  • esthetic and mythic
  • highly specialized and exclusive

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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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