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 devastation
Below is a list of describing words for devastation. 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 devastation:
- possibly vast
- silent and utter
- distinctive, ear-splitting
- much horrible
- signal great
- further ecological
- certainly deal
- pale, bestial
- terrible and scandalous
- implacable, methodical
- unchecked deal
- wildest and most cruel
- otherwise pitiless
- idea--general
- similar and speedy
- far-reaching and horrible
- equal or worse
- wanton, ruthless
- full, horrifying
- utter and appalling
- worldwide ecological
- wilted gray
- murderous destructive
- deliberate and vindictive
- utter and incredible
- thorough, widespread
- eternal and somewhat boring
- complete and appalling
- real and not mere
- furious and complete
- decisive material
- horrid and irreparable
- recent and cruel
- impressive and awful
- irreversible environmental
- immediate and massive
- climatic and tidal
- widespread seismic
- seismal
- wholesale and systematic
- just endless
- personal and complete
- cruel and wanton
- somewhat boring
- sudden and bright
- same nuclear
- wanton and unnecessary
- gradual but sure
- down nuclear
- more defenseless
- bizarre, alien
- swift and total
- complete and terrible
- inner, personal
- vast and extensive
- heretofore invisible
- other global
- seemingly total
- cruel and ferocious
- such supernatural
- wide and general
- black charred
- great judicial
- famous short
- own tremendous
- petty german
- acute personal
- equally harsh
- complete emotional
- terrible, awful
- more wide
- such unheard-of
- more widespread
- complete and total
- such utter
- such fearful
- physical and emotional
- vast and terrible
- psychic and physical
- such ferocious
- emotional and spiritual
- such wholesale
- almost total
- utter
- such appalling
- periodic
- such inner
- such total
- same awful
- almost utter
- such terrific
- nuclear
- sun-bleached
- wholesale
- wanton
- little serious
- almost entire
- such formidable
- emotional and physical
- ecological
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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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