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 demeanour
Below is a list of describing words for demeanour. 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 demeanour:
- calm and sedate
- psychologically fragile
- thoroughbred and facile
- markedly militant
- grave and indignant
- usually modest
- haughty and cold
- unrestrained, affectionate
- insulting and violent
- stealthy and tragical
- strikingly quiet
- steadfast and unmoved
- whole civilisational
- elaborately calm
- stern and inscrutable
- quiet and even torpid
- startlingly ferocious
- staid, pious
- grave quick
- grave and unaccountable
- wild fearless
- placid and modest
- undaunted and even impudent
- superficially indifferent
- heavy somnolent
- modest shy
- prim, sedate
- habitually submissive
- lofty and grave
- tacit, immovable
- haughty and stubborn
- noble and calm
- aggressively military
- submissive and absent-minded
- almost submissive and absent-minded
- moody and stern
- generous and bold
- refined and yet simple
- pert pragmatical
- casual, cool
- new and oriental
- habitual grave
- specially stern
- uniformly cheerful and indifferent
- abnormally sheep-like
- obsequious and insincere
- heavy and considerate
- unnatural and unkind
- officiously hostile
- inflexibly sombre
- solemn, modest
- refined and severely correct
- calm and commonplace
- absurd and old-fashioned
- haughty and amusingly impassable
- amusingly impassable
- grave, unruffled
- watchful, self-confident
- exceedingly staid
- subtle, stern
- judiciously scornful
- indifferent and apparently careless
- usually grave and tragic
- graceful and truly refined
- extraordinarily quiet and respectful
- grave, gentle and quiet
- unassuming and natural
- rather formal and grave
- impassible, self-contained
- suggestively self-righteous
- confidently asinine
- indifferent and moral
- blank, grave
- outward calm and careless
- somewhat pompous and overbearing
- respectful and highly deferential
- usual sanctified
- modest and mournful
- devout and prudent
- trenchant official
- severest and most authoritative
- cool and self-confident
- serious distant
- elusive, offhand
- modest and even shy
- deferential and almost servile
- cavalier and cordial
- unruffled and sardonic
- perfectly impassible
- modest or unconscious
- affectedly grave
- strictly courteous
- impertinent and overbearing
- impressive or triumphant
- solemn and even austere
- calm, circumspect
- prudent, grave
- reverent, solemn
- independent and overbearing
- perfectly calm and tranquil
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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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