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 degree
Below is a list of describing words for degree. 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 degree:
- especial or unusual
- immeasurably stronger
- preternatural and intolerable
- superior and astonishing
- memorably potent
- same millionth
- scholastic honorary
- usual hermetic
- special and startling
- comparative or superlative
- incomparably closer
- apparently unsafe
- almost reprehensible
- nearer and freer
- vehement and intense
- due and requisite
- greater or less
- powerful and even menacing
- sadly lesser
- however high or low
- tragically ineffectual
- high or excessive
- unmeasurable and extravagant
- definite, quantitative
- smallest or lowest
- superlative or highest
- minor, incipient
- sensibly scant
- indefinite, normal
- greatest or highest
- fatal and mortal
- incalculably higher
- fiftieth honorary
- scientifically revolutionary
- last bearable
- absolutely unthinkable
- great or less
- slightest or most remote
- rude and incipient
- highest and most superlative
- lowest academical
- inferior academical
- negative thermometrical
- decidedly lesser
- hateful and slimy
- equal or nearer
- great and heroical
- different and nearer
- compounding--usual
- passionate or intense
- extraordinarily great and wonderful
- fourth canonical
- however infinitesimal
- acute and distressing
- appreciable additional
- first-class mathematical
- higher or lesser
- absolute positive
- greater or lesser
- small but palpable
- rare and spectacular
- almost preposterous
- morbid and obsessive
- faint and highly irritating
- high, unexplained
- almost mind-numbing
- >absolutely unthinkable
- better-than-minimal
- last and perfect
- posthumous honorary
- gentle and equal
- polish superior
- striking and uncontrollable
- highest or chief
- plainly unreasonable
- excessive and plainly unreasonable
- curious and superlative
- important and entirely innocent
- humble positive
- disproportionate and unreasonable
- illustrious honorary
- sometimes conscious
- extreme and esoterical
- inconceivably smaller
- pleasing mild
- serious and very alarming
- faint or even strong
- due or moderate
- inevitably greater or less
- inevitably greater
- fair or even complete
- highest honorary
- rather indispensable
- temporary and comparatively trifling
- wickedly agreeable
- intermediate and moderate
- partial and latent
- almost infuriating
- vexatious or painful
- sufficient or even tolerable
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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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