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 curves

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

  • subtle simple
  • aimless, wayward
  • excruciatingly flat
  • hard, comfortable
  • green massive
  • least, spherical
  • circumterrestrial ahorizontal
  • amazing dynamic
  • strictly typical
  • suave and enchanting
  • slight workmanlike
  • epicycloidal and hypocycloidal
  • normal weighted
  • rich taut
  • beautiful spinal
  • naturally elegant
  • horrible, sinuous
  • obscurely symmetrical
  • old exponential
  • random facial
  • barest top
  • correct facial
  • gentle and extensive
  • familiar asymptotic
  • perfect cycloidal
  • restful azure
  • slow random
  • inward sinuous
  • bold convex
  • graceful great
  • intricate uncomfortable
  • smooth, subtropical
  • fittingly complex
  • sensitive strange
  • low and lean
  • dreamy delicate
  • cautious and gradual
  • mildly organic
  • aristocratic conventional
  • gentle downward
  • many esthetic
  • slight parallel
  • interesting but intricate
  • huge and moss-covered
  • elegant imaginable
  • continuous, sinuous
  • taut, proud
  • ahorizontal
  • trochoidal
  • broader orange
  • conventional characteristic
  • slightly sensual
  • corresponding trochoidal
  • sinuous, sensitive
  • still indeterminate
  • inner and therefore shorter
  • formidable arched
  • gentle convex
  • top, delicate and beautiful
  • bicursal
  • hopelessly youthful
  • sudden hyperbolical
  • sorrowful, downward
  • old-time, humorous
  • slim new
  • gentle pleasing
  • smooth and predictable
  • shallow spiral
  • almost concentric
  • invisible polynomial
  • uneven three-dimensional
  • pale, generous
  • jagged and discontinuous
  • childlike irregular
  • strong, dim
  • visible undulating
  • palm-lined ochre
  • less-formal
  • inverted exponential
  • requisite female
  • uphill serpentine
  • pale graceful
  • soft and childlike
  • rapid, fantastic
  • neat tight
  • great tangential
  • steep, unending
  • subtle and poisonous
  • uncannily regular
  • beautiful humble
  • flawless concrete
  • true corresponding
  • smooth first-order
  • large abrupt
  • brown, sensual
  • amphoral
  • insolent, luscious
  • rude slight
  • softly exquisite
  • aimless, unnecessary

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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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