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 cult

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

  • utterly dionysian
  • evil bygone
  • obscene and raucous
  • militant and subversive
  • curiously intangible
  • national tibetan
  • sly intangible
  • great heliocentric
  • contemptible syrian
  • pacifistic, moralistic
  • vicious and nihilistic
  • one-time magical
  • paranoid religious
  • fanatically anti-scientific
  • faint and somewhat fantastic
  • modernistic degenerate
  • primitive totemic
  • barbarous and awful
  • embryonic religious
  • specific sacrificial
  • definite primeval
  • nocturnal feminine
  • degraded and obscene
  • provincial imperial
  • sane and unassailable
  • nasty magical
  • nascent revolutionary
  • localized religious
  • nonviolent heretical
  • exotic religious
  • uninformed primitive
  • strange, murderous
  • nice all-american
  • low-level satanic
  • small, oddball
  • large and needy
  • abstruse and mysterious
  • somewhat exclusive and intolerant
  • half-forgotten heathen
  • morally overwhelming
  • powerful and morally overwhelming
  • antique platonic
  • one-sided, sterile
  • self-respecting naked
  • bumptious military
  • fierce, strict
  • limited, contemporary
  • originally italian
  • mystical and fashionable
  • non-moral popular
  • joyful and voluptuous
  • religious distributive
  • old and very abiding
  • amorphous and jejune
  • real totemic
  • mystic or fantastic
  • exclusive and rational
  • so-called modernistic
  • narrow doctrinaire
  • aboriginal religious
  • mexican and mayan
  • new millennial
  • incredibly tenacious
  • secret pagan
  • shadowy international
  • viciously bizarre
  • fanatical, murderous
  • small and somewhat ineffectual
  • wicked, self-serving
  • latest leftist
  • ancient and abominable
  • principal mystic
  • orgiastic, frenzied
  • georgia-based satanic
  • well-meaning but illicit
  • peculiar secret
  • frightful and repulsive
  • maniacally secretive
  • creepy religious
  • paramilitary religious
  • devilish cannibal
  • korean religious
  • reclusive religious
  • bizarre satanic
  • fraternal military
  • obscure but harmless
  • bizarre, insane
  • dangerous self-serving
  • sturdy and somewhat faithful
  • somewhat faithful
  • embarrassing satanic
  • secret babylonian
  • actively apocalyptic
  • ersatz egyptian
  • worldwide best-selling
  • odd pagan
  • apocalyptic messianic
  • techno-mystical
  • evil and pseudo
  • brief imperial

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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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