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 diction
Below is a list of describing words for diction. 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 diction:
- once indelible
- vicious poetic
- eloquently perfect
- purest and most florid
- proverbial and familiar
- sonorous elizabethan
- figurative picturesque
- impassioned dramatic
- plain and calm
- fancy and felicitous
- rich, idiomatic
- regular tragic
- stilted poetic
- pure, energetic
- spurious poetic
- full and tuneful
- chaste and unadorned
- sometimes harsh and uncouth
- elaborately poetic
- insincere poetic
- often languid and slipshod
- often languid
- turgid and bombastic
- clear precise
- precise academic
- marvelously distinct
- melodious and splendid
- merely felicitous
- classical, chaste
- perfectly simple and graceful
- chaste, classical
- pedantic, over-technical
- clear, commercial
- crisp western
- feeble or ridiculous
- exuberant, melodious
- lumpish and tedious
- bright, exact
- pure and fascinating
- obsolete or peculiar
- obscure and highly artificial
- subtle tragic
- smooth and sonorous
- loose and ungrammatical
- hyperbolical poetic
- sonorous and splendid
- pompous and unintelligible
- nervous poetical
- romanesque and florid
- strongest and most nervous
- flexibly expressive
- terse, bald
- rapid, magnificent
- commonplace, colloquial
- charming biblical
- moderately antique
- lofty and overwhelming
- leisurely old-fashioned
- recital and thrilling
- rhetorical and ambitious
- vivacious, unaffected
- magnificent miltonic
- fluent, liquid
- florid or elegant
- preternaturally majestic
- sonorous and copious
- singularly luminous and expressive
- decidedly un-oriental
- extravagant and grandiloquent
- notably precise
- notably precise and clear
- appropriate, chaste or beautiful
- chaste or beautiful
- picturesque and pungent
- often bombastic
- extravagant and often bombastic
- false poetical
- cultured and graceful
- frigid poetic
- convincing and graphic
- colloquial and feeble
- tailor-made british
- fancy and chaste
- own shakespearian
- perpetual metaphorical
- fresh and realistic
- pompous artificial
- fancy and pictorial
- rough and prosaic
- refined and natural
- unfamiliar poetic
- artificial poetical
- chaste and well-balanced
- figurative and hyperbolic
- nervous but unusual
- faultless spanish
- elaborately precise
- grand imaginative
- exact and felicitous
- spanish poetic
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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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