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 difficulty
Below is a list of describing words for difficulty. 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 difficulty:
- serious special
- greatest and most insuperable
- narrow-minded, scented
- foggy, more
- abstract judicial
- insurmountable prospective
- glaringly clear
- unforeseen and inexplicable
- fatal and insoluble
- next or greatest
- real and crucial
- last and most exacting
- tively minor
- corporeal and psychic
- intricate and immeasurable
- extraordinary and perplexing
- least matrimonial
- new and apparently insuperable
- ever least
- unaccountable and ever new
- journal, much
- sudden and almost unprecedented
- definite and substantive
- trifling unexpected
- serious chronological
- real, rational
- old and stubborn
- great and almost insuperable
- almost insuperable
- strange and irritating
- singular and annoying
- vague respiratory
- considerable and disquieting
- large, unexpected
- much or serious
- slight and nearly imperceptible
- insuperable constitutional
- new and even graver
- small, unforeseen
- unique and fearful
- natural and perplexing
- greatest and realest
- deceptively serious
- new and insuperable
- imperfect, great
- covert, great
- nameless moral
- probable, little
- astounding historical
- material preliminary
- chronological or other
- stubborn, constitutional
- serious intrinsic
- real and stupendous
- tremendous and apparently insuperable
- _un_real
- new and apparently insurmountable
- symmetrical, considerable
- permanent or ruinous
- deaf considerable
- initial and insuperable
- real and almost insuperable
- stiff financial
- enormous statistical
- old copernican
- extreme immense
- puttal much
- downward, additional
- chief initial
- invariable and insuperable
- painful and almost inextricable
- compulsory, much
- little or perhaps less
- proverbial and preliminary
- acute and oppressive
- less or ordinary
- reasonable but not unanswerable
- least digestive
- serious and apparently insurmountable
- valid geographical
- great and hitherto insuperable
- next and greater
- entirely prohibitive
- extravagant vocal
- insurmountable domestic
- hitherto insurmountable
- insuperable intellectual
- further or serious
- inevitable, such
- smaller outstanding
- imminent native
- engrossing and ever-swelling
- knotty religious
- unhappy mexican
- ordinary intercolonial
- great or insurmountable
- frequent comparative
- overwhelming and troublesome
- insuperable
- apparently insuperable
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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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