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 criteria
Below is a list of describing words for criteria. 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 criteria:
- formal dynastic
- likewise defective and unreliable
- likewise defective
- private and unavoidable
- paradoxically private and unavoidable
- paradoxically private
- somewhat coarse and inadequate
- never basic
- coarse but fairly trustworthy
- usual sandoval
- idle chinese
- tentative but useful
- certain or extreme
- nearly valueless
- satisfying arcane
- same revival
- prejudicial or superficial
- neutral and naive
- rigid deterministic
- simple and infallible
- absurd, normal
- tenable and tangible
- other out-of-school
- certain and unequivocal
- final or irrefutable
- foreign or irrelevant
- important and most constant
- sure or satisfactory
- altogether sure or satisfactory
- sure infallible
- speculative, evolutionary
- divisional, little
- extraordinarily clear and fine
- unfailing and certain
- sole impartial
- substantive ethical
- sure, indisputable
- practical and biological
- universal but purely negative
- characteristic and certain
- utilitarian and ethical
- coarse and inadequate
- several definitive
- \~\~revival
- concise diagnostic
- simple, convenient
- stiff bureaucratic
- proximate practical
- other, unemotional
- ultimate and decisive
- rotten, unreliable
- certain and decisive
- autonomous analytical
- real unquestionable
- convenient secondary
- behaviorally recognizable
- simplest and surest
- morphological and syntactic
- aesthetic and functional
- characteristic and infallible
- universal and infallible
- altogether fair
- grand and large
- sure and convenient
- few parental
- valuable auxiliary
- acceptable scientific
- reasonable legal
- absolute and definite
- more infallible
- apply scientific
- saner and truer
- reasonably well-defined
- independent, rational
- certain operational
- fiscal and monetary
- true and independent
- single medical
- definite biological
- generally acceptable
- commonplace physical
- utterly frank
- same pragmatic
- immediate and definite
- altogether sure
- less fallible
- essential and peculiar
- extremely serviceable
- easiest and surest
- other diagnostic
- literary or intellectual
- more unsafe
- rigorous scientific
- incredibly important
- remarkably flexible
- sole immediate
- own esthetic
- merely quantitative
- physiological or anatomical
- national or political
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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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