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 defiance
Below is a list of describing words for defiance. 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 defiance:
- self-conscious, infantile
- dumb and inflexible
- provocative, direct
- briefly jaunty
- final, ludicrous
- incessant wise
- forth grim
- wild and resentful
- full and ponderous
- stubborn, petty
- proud and even insolent
- brave and protracted
- clenched, taut
- enviable and easy
- unexpected and uncompromising
- open and impudent
- hopeless, tricky
- arrogant or high-spirited
- inconvenient external
- rich insolent
- dumb, inanimate
- usual resolute
- good-natured, childlike
- such gruff
- blind, fierce
- final, self-sacrificial
- mean-spirited, vicious
- insolent, unprecedented
- reckless and impious
- fiercely debonair
- passionate individualistic
- shameless and beautiful
- immense but heroic
- almost injurious
- seemingly chivalrous
- haughty, cruel and inexorable
- dark, unwilling
- absolute and dangerous
- grim but whimsical
- passionate and high-spirited
- polite but irrevocable
- bitter remorseless
- angry and boisterous
- terrific and audacious
- haughty and sublime
- blind and audacious
- pardoxical
- stern and almost pardoxical
- almost pardoxical
- grand and absolute
- explicit or emphatic
- unconquerable jewish
- latest sturdy
- youthful and masculine
- morose and watchful
- forth tremulous
- ungracious and reckless
- such quasi-feudal
- cold-blooded, triumphant
- bold but calm
- sick, vain
- arbitrary and dictatorial
- utter and complacent
- utter and open
- wildest and bitterest
- heavy and horrifying
- equal and terrible
- ill-timed and unworthy
- awful and impious
- late perplexing
- reckless, scornful
- instantaneous and full-throated
- insolent, passionate
- humorous, truculent
- habitual and implacable
- ironic and superb
- cool, proud
- pitiful weak
- blind and pointless
- coolly arrogant
- certain raffish
- daring and bold
- noble lyrical
- useless, pitiful
- gay and wild
- servitorial
- >slightly ragged
- conscious, decisive
- outrageous but good-natured
- vain but valiant
- vital, quiet
- bright, passionate
- pitiful, deranged
- unshakeable feminine
- glaring proud
- mad, pitiful
- blind, courageous
- short and resolute
- voiceless, impenetrable
- sheer allout
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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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