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 details
Below is a list of describing words for details. 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 details:
- last piddling
- fascinating, finicky
- great and insulting
- full and boring
- fascinating architectural
- repulsive superficial
- thrilling and accurate
- essential minor
- strict and fearful
- beautiful & pathetic
- minutely comprehensive
- minor but extremely important
- chief few
- superlatively accurate
- obscene and blatant
- lengthy and somewhat intricate
- needlessly distressing
- myriad unexplainable
- such nitpicking
- often wearisome and uninteresting
- tactical and human
- important and entirely unpublished
- petty and puzzling
- trivial architectural
- small and puzzling
- sober, daring
- finer or fainter
- tedious osteological
- petty ancestral
- still obscure and indistinct
- crucial architectural
- harsh and wanton
- _amateur_--mechanical
- thorough and revolting
- intimate anatomical
- graphic and gruesome
- nasty, fascinating
- profoundly tedious
- additional ominous
- last repulsive
- recent and private
- somewhat dry and monotonous
- chief hypothetical
- subordinate but significant
- prosaic and perplexing
- suggestive and exquisite
- further topographical
- insipid and perhaps superfluous
- shameful, degrading
- assorted tedious
- considerable and pleasant
- petty legalistic
- transient delicate
- financial and contractual
- gnarled and tiny
- gory medical
- nearly lifelike
- mundane and trivial
- boring and often inaccurate
- anatomic and geometric
- single delectable
- dull financial
- tragic and gruesome
- bare biotechnical
- daring or even noble
- numerous constructive
- protracted and boring
- almost gargantuan
- piddling, vital
- of--final
- sexual and scatological
- glorious anatomical
- vivid and quantitative
- infinite visual
- myriad physical
- obscene or outlandish
- small, predictable
- additional and convincing
- explosive and disturbing
- unprecedented and laborious
- trivial and yet insane
- much small-scale
- exact, concrete
- last topographical
- intimate and shocking
- seemingly self-defeating
- technical and observational
- little hilarious
- pertinent and personal
- graphic anatomical
- fantastic and often puerile
- jerky, helter-skelter
- salient and sensitive
- enough biographical
- concise but unwanted
- truly graphic and gruesome
- minutely faithful
- overly lavish
- occasionally grotesque
- intricate and realistic
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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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