Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 dialogue

Below is a list of describing words for dialogue. 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 dialogue:

  • trenchantly satirical
  • witty and trenchantly satirical
  • pert, low
  • second-rate theatrical
  • long pantomimical
  • real corny
  • frustrating, inscrutable
  • brief but historic
  • perfunctory, domestic
  • flimsy fine
  • interminable padded
  • constructive bipartisan
  • surely interesting
  • plain and humorous
  • genuine interfaith
  • open, face-to-face
  • singular and cynical
  • vilely realistic
  • natural and spicy
  • often swift and easy
  • short facetious
  • exquisite, lyrical
  • oddly confidential
  • acutely familiar
  • lengthy and illuminating
  • silent, complex
  • monstrous, momentous
  • warmish medieval
  • electric succinct
  • animated and acrimonious
  • sprightly colloquial
  • bright and snappy
  • constant and fascinating
  • fuzzy internal
  • discreet inner
  • worth dramatic
  • witty, sophisticated
  • momentary internal
  • still meaningful
  • frivolous, realistic
  • clever and often excellent
  • tolerably well-written
  • rapt and feverish
  • often coarse and suggestive
  • sometimes dull and heavy
  • sublime or familiar
  • smart satirical
  • eminently dramatic and sparkling
  • always sparkling and witty
  • always bright and witty
  • singular and one-sided
  • natural and lucid
  • satirical brisk
  • far-famed philosophical
  • accurate and real
  • brief and entirely unsatisfactory
  • subtle or fantastic
  • intimate, heart-to-heart
  • poignant small
  • gracefully amorous
  • pithy, tense
  • foreign, funny
  • brief but edifying
  • delightful and most humorous
  • horrible but pithy
  • sparkling, natural
  • natural elegant
  • animated and boisterous
  • didactic and positive
  • long, rapid-fire
  • shamefully profligate
  • melodious and sensuous
  • successful pastoral
  • facile dramatic
  • bright, easy and natural
  • trifling, superfluous
  • marvellously descriptive
  • brisk and most amusing
  • grand mournful
  • suggestive and curious
  • nowhere wordy or redundant
  • nowhere wordy
  • alternate and incessant
  • merry and farcical
  • pithy, rapid-fire
  • coarse but highly picturesque
  • frothy and clever
  • partially unreported
  • sparkling epigrammatic
  • natural and yet pregnant
  • great anti-rhetorical
  • anti-rhetorical
  • aristotelian or ciceronian
  • elegant orchestral
  • vivacious political
  • lyrico-episodical
  • last and pathetic
  • life-long, endless
  • photographically dull
  • witty and brilliant

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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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