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 design
Below is a list of describing words for design. 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 design:
- airy spacious
- classic, simple
- ever-changing, exhilarating
- elegantly simplistic
- grotesque and almost repulsive
- unusual filigree
- basic bad
- lightweight, streamlined
- no-nonsense germanic
- abstract and seemingly meaningless
- symbolic alchemical
- intricate and bizarre
- conservative chain-store
- malign and clever
- barbaric but stunningly beautiful
- aztec or egyptian
- accidental or true
- new and perhaps unprecedented
- sophisticated experimental
- similar or appropriate
- distinctly radical
- otherwise utilitarian
- astounding technological
- rectilinear human
- }traditional floral
- uniformly depressing
- florid and large
- marvelous corporeal
- low papistical
- inconsistent and meaningless
- coloured floral
- secret psychohistorical
- conventional galactic
- colorful but traditional
- odd and almost scandalous
- unusually repugnant
- clever acoustical
- startlingly alien
- quaint and gothic
- eccentric structural
- latest and revolutionary
- deliberate merciful
- ornate and repetitive
- material and original
- odd pentagonal
- dreadful and selfish
- linear and geometric
- comely quiet
- conscious, comprehensive
- modern functional
- incredibly archaic
- gorgeous psychohistorical
- blue snow-crystal
- flamboyant, fanciful
- intricate final
- dazzling geometric
- antique tapered
- somehow significant
- typically crass
- multicolored and severely two-dimensional
- severely two-dimensional
- economical functional
- different bizarre
- elegant organic
- narrow, quirky
- lustily intricate
- correspondingly efficient
- recognizable and familiar
- florid middle-age
- wicked but careless
- skilful and homogeneous
- gilt, special
- commendable and pious
- symmetrical architectural
- politic and shrewd
- french and foppish
- family matrimonial
- severest gothic
- imply terminal
- interior and typical
- definitely allegoric
- poetic philosophic
- secret and concurrent
- tragical but necessary
- odd and picturesque
- successful generalized
- cunning aerodynamic
- current aggregate
- bad physcial
- overall floral
- grand and infinite
- bold, intricate
- alien abstract
- grandiose and excessive
- identical imperial
- appropriately complex
- benevolent and high-minded
- peculiarly asymmetrical
- cunning and astounding
- ingenious and splendid
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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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