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 detective
Below is a list of describing words for detective. 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 detective:
- fictional human
- husky private
- completely engrossing
- hulking private
- medium-sized private
- grizzled and capable
- quiet and triumphant
- sharpest commercial
- fat private
- diligent undercover
- enigmatic private
- legendary private
- top-selling new
- nice, hard-boiled
- genteel and perfectly safe
- quiet, bulky
- young undercover
- repulsive private
- missing private
- futuristic hard-boiled
- shrewdest private
- amiable jewish
- typical idiot
- pedantically neat
- calmly mendacious
- dear free-lance
- german-born but thoroughly loyal
- amateurish and very poor
- gigantic, vigilant
- astute private
- self-appointed young
- last astute
- thoroughly reliable and responsible
- successful and materialistic
- seemingly able
- shrewd and seemingly able
- cool-headed, vigilant
- able and most successful
- thrilling and highly exciting
- presumably sharp
- active, cautious
- bally private
- reputable private
- well-known private
- painstaking and dangerous
- hard deductive
- methodical, intelligent
- ingeniously intricate
- capable private
- clever, up-to-date
- well-dressed private
- suave and confident
- penniless private
- wry famous
- least intuitive
- intense, young
- french forensic
- handsome, intense
- certifiably brilliant
- galactic true
- famous existential
- abrasive and inefficient
- feline private
- irish private
- precise and thorough
- pompous belgian
- overly angry
- uninvited, uninformed
- nutty private
- macho big-city
- snappy scientific
- fifth private
- fictional twentieth-century
- forthcoming cozy
- ancient fictional
- shady private
- latter-day fictional
- thoroughgoing and unimaginative
- flashy intellectual
- cynical hardboiled
- down-and-out hard-boiled
- equally brilliant and enigmatic
- brilliant and enigmatic
- famously rumpled
- thoroughly working-class
- atypical private
- young, steady
- blue-eyed first-class
- goddamned private
- lowly australian
- overly authoritative
- seasoned private
- favorite rumpled
- extraordinary garish
- heavy and loquacious
- short, heavy and loquacious
- shrewd female
- one-time famous
- little, third-rate
- clever superior
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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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