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 dilemma
Below is a list of describing words for dilemma. 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 dilemma:
- real, agonizing
- juridical and theological
- traditional mythic
- personal marital
- cruel and impossible
- bleak moral
- nasty moral
- perplexing and unforeseen
- equally troubling
- simple constructive
- major moral
- true feminist
- impossibly painful
- deadly interplanetary
- purely subjective and imaginary
- extraordinary and most embarrassing
- intolerant logical
- puzzling and disagreeable
- unpleasant and ludicrous
- devilish delicate
- unexpected formidable
- sharp logical
- apocryphal rhetorical
- crucial and unavoidable
- rare but agreeable
- usual nationalistic
- mournful and inextricable
- frequent hopeless
- simple destructive
- complex destructive
- complex constructive
- agonizing human
- percival own
- unexpected and difficult
- human-ancipital
- capital ethical
- odious and ongoing
- mously difficult
- major volitional
- particularly humorous
- puzzling diplomatic
- greatest planetary
- time-honored philosophical
- long-standing cosmological
- desperate and totally unpredictable
- fascinating moral
- weird ethical
- northern metaphysical
- terrible basic
- biggest ethical
- troublesome, royal
- long-standing theological
- great existential
- serious theoretical
- hopeless tragic
- fatal and fateful
- perfectly definite and concrete
- present unspeakable
- hopelessly inextricable
- most embarrassing
- sudden tactical
- zoological and arch�ological
- zoological and archaeological
- private moral
- enormously difficult
- recent moral
- strange and embarrassing
- original doctrinal
- sufficiently decisive
- real and urgent
- seemingly difficult
- otherwise insoluble
- small moral
- evenhanded
- specific ethical
- current virtual
- common avian
- insoluble ethical
- psychologically stressful
- distinctly awkward
- awkward legal
- contradictory, inconsistent
- same protracted
- almost inexorable
- apparent ethical
- otherwise inextricable
- dangerous and unhappy
- nearly insurmountable
- awkward and dangerous
- hopeless and inextricable
- obviously unpleasant
- difficult moral
- small ethical
- tiny, absurd
- physiological
- cosmic animal
- genuinely horrific
- hypocritical moral
- same ungracious
- present pitiable
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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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