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 discovery
Below is a list of describing words for discovery. 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 discovery:
- unique accidental
- same, bemused
- tardy and obscure
- negotiations--accidental
- practical medico-legal
- astounding archaeological
- thy humane
- holy spanish
- certain, strange and true
- accidental and somewhat astounding
- useful and immensely profitable
- virtually world-shaking
- gradual and imperfect
- peculiarly gratifying
- extraordinary and inadvertent
- thirty-fourth visual
- swift and prolific
- extraordinarily dark and delicate
- highly coincidental
- fortuitous and highly coincidental
- unreleased astronomical
- promising and unexpected
- great, imminent
- notable and delightful
- brilliant and most important
- significant and unpleasant
- australian maritime
- curious and totally unexpected
- startling and far-reaching
- further, sudden
- momentous new
- minor positive
- fast unpublished
- blasphemous spiritual
- long, acute
- furious draconian
- original or surprising
- recent and tremendous
- totally prosaic
- revolutionary, unprecedented
- welcome but most unexpected
- unpleasant and unseasonable
- recent fortunate
- dimly precious
- surprising, overwhelming
- inevitable easy
- extraordinary and all-important
- queer and simple
- intuitive, direct
- wonderful impending
- basic and momentous
- deep recondite
- amazing and frightful
- surprising and annoying
- interesting biblical
- simultaneous and grand
- new vicious
- telescopic visual
- startling and horrifying
- dangerous and useful
- greatest archaeological
- extraordinary anthropological
- impossible, fundamental
- sublime astronomical
- confusing but highly useful
- undeniably astonishing
- final heartening
- fleeting but significant
- unsettling secondary
- new and unsavory
- recent and very disquieting
- sort-of-accidental
- maximum and yet accidental
- meaningful private
- other, shocking
- unparalleled scientific
- remarkable archeological
- brilliant electro-magnetic
- crowning geographical
- lightning-like and unexpected
- unhappy, unseasonable
- wrong subsequent
- gigantic geometrical
- late useful
- maritime geographical
- little but useful
- brand-new and highly extraordinary
- highly extraordinary
- wide or certain
- evil and distressing
- startling domestic
- exquisite and startling
- biological, chemical
- york--accidental
- unutterably bitter
- painful and unutterably bitter
- unexpected and most amazing
- painfully responsible
- portuguese and european
- prime new
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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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