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 dictionary
Below is a list of describing words for dictionary. 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 dictionary:
- standard electrical
- concise standard
- practical standard
- large unabridged
- comprehensive encyclopedic
- universal pronouncing
- top online
- comprehensive standard
- pronouncing medical
- universal and critical
- universal shorter
- good etymological
- pronouncing and explanatory
- copious etymological
- big unabridged
- smaller classical
- critical pronouncing
- general biographical
- entire genuine
- great unabridged
- good unabridged
- _oriental biographical
- concise etymological
- chinese biographical
- largest complete
- french pronouncing
- pronouncing spanish
- authoritative logical
- french biographical
- popular bibliographical
- biographical and moral
- standard pronouncing
- concise bible
- well-known biographical
- universal technological
- new pronouncing
- comprehensive technical
- encyclopedic psychic
- their--classical
- universal biographical
- explanatory pronouncing
- statistical or commercial
- commercial or statistical
- small pronouncing
- explanatory and pronouncing
- valuable _etymological
- diminutive and unsatisfactory
- second-hand dutch
- voluminous geographical
- deservedly popular and useful
- full-bodied and picturesque
- together straight
- reliable unabridged
- latest extensive
- international unabridged
- valuable horticultural
- complete & universal
- general _biographical
- _universal and critical
- derivative and etymological
- main french-language
- useful _critical
- up-to-date =biographical
- good bengali
- earliest biographical
- _general and biographical
- convenient, cheap
- chief etymological
- portly biographical
- hundred--social
- huge classical
- universal and pronouncing
- _critical biographical
- mental social
- invaluable biographical
- unfinished japanese
- handy classical
- useful conchological
- valuable _critical
- chronological and etymological
- geographical, chronological and etymological
- german conversational
- concise and reasonably full
- capital biographical
- tedious, scientific
- unabridged
- new handy
- _geographical and historical
- accurate philosophical
- bibliographical or biographical
- gigantic biographical
- anonymous portuguese
- largest geographical
- next etymological
- classical and mythological
- general bibliographical
- concise biographical
- large biographical
- comprehensive biographical
- bulky french
Popular Searches
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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