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 desire
Below is a list of describing words for desire. 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 desire:
- well-nigh impersonal
- foolish, immature
- madly unreasoning
- rabid, irrational
- fervent habitual
- sudden, morbid
- sleepy but strong
- greatest, fondest
- constant and overwhelming
- infamous and hateful
- vague, powerful
- warm, definite
- irresistible and frequent
- sexual and possessive
- own near-pathological
- sometimes scarce
- sincere and paramount
- good-natured merciful
- probably sinless
- intense but probably sinless
- government--universal
- earlier unprecedented
- unappeasable and patriotic
- eager and legitimate
- eager and fearful
- rather charming and innocent
- immediate and undisguised
- stupid, insidious
- instantaneous, little-girl
- evil or corrupt
- strong, innate
- strong and pretty general
- eccentric and cruel
- obstinate and ardent
- thy knowledgeable
- uncontrollable, inexpressible
- eager, despairing
- wholly guilty
- sheer feverish
- vague distressed
- sick, vague
- nervous but impractical
- limitless and yet unsatisfied
- perfectly reasonable and proper
- sudden and absolutely absurd
- horrible, lustful
- inexplicable and finally cruel
- recurrent and essentially vicious
- furtive but strong
- undying, sweet
- anxious and almost covetous
- passionate unfulfilled
- unsatisfied selfish
- thrice eager
- new and thrice eager
- unconquerable and unaccountable
- intense and impotent
- persistent and undeniable
- misguided and heroic
- overeager, ignorant
- historic and ferocious
- splendid and perfectly clean
- powerful, possessive
- sullen but unmistakable
- lowest and most automatic
- constant malevolent
- absolutely satanic
- inanimate and yet ferocious
- savage unrequited
- crazed, lustful
- hot, wrenching
- sudden, greedy
- ridiculous but nevertheless strong
- newfound and undisciplined
- thought-out, reasonable
- community�s�rational, reasonable
- community�s�rational
- crazy, unaccountable
- brief, abnormal
- partly mischievous
- involuntary fierce
- awake pure
- greedy great
- barbarous or slavish
- urgent instinctive
- faint, unknown
- mere blood-thirsty
- fond unnamed
- inconceivably ardent
- sex-fanatics--sexual
- sore and vain
- excessive venereal
- evident and officious
- innate passionate
- candid and childlike
- clamorous and persistent
- sudden and rather absurd
- mad, primitive
- wild, cynical
- inordinate and almost irresistible
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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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