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 discussion
Below is a list of describing words for discussion. 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 discussion:
- quick and expensive
- brief follow-on
- considerable sartorial
- long and sufficiently idiotic
- interminable and apparently fruitless
- judicious and balanced
- slightly lengthy
- informal roundtable
- animated but fruitless
- open and frequent
- exciting and crucial
- long and semihysterical
- long subvocal
- unregulated and fruitless
- brief but reasonable
- simple, convivial
- popular and decorous
- full and logical
- premature and irritating
- sufficiently idiotic
- sharp, animated
- taut, intense
- lengthy technical
- thrice-weekly roundtable
- recent and unsatisfactory
- clinical roundtable
- academic and timid
- acrimonious and emotional
- exceedingly acrimonious and emotional
- exceedingly acrimonious
- serious and animated
- startlingly technical
- lively technical
- eager and stormy
- airy and ironical
- somewhat fruitless
- optimistic, forward-looking
- acrimonious diplomatic
- fair and cool
- brief but still hot
- quick, futile
- sole ornithological
- private and sober
- ample and rational
- brief and animated
- generally pointless
- considerable pragmatical
- freest philosophical
- caustically frank
- apparently animated
- formal and desultory
- calm and free
- farther confidential
- roundtable
- further and deliberate
- important long-range
- satisfactory but relatively unexciting
- relatively unexciting
- terse, painful
- long, pedantic
- grim, businesslike
- other and quite distinct
- pleasant acrimonious
- indiscreet philosophic
- technical, pro\-fessional
- enigmatic professional
- decent philosophical
- such wishful
- protracted metaphysical
- diffuse local
- remarkable and unedifying
- quick but entirely respectful
- curious three-way
- fanciful and extremely filthy
- obstinate, inconclusive
- eager and somewhat truculent
- fairly full and impartial
- almost interesting
- physiologic and economic
- eager, self-absorbed
- _thursday_--oral
- much and anxious
- full and theological
- temperate or wholesome
- alive theological
- serious or deep
- vague and popular
- initial verbal
- acute recent
- free and dispassionate
- tedious apologetic
- weak, academical
- open and constructive
- much rueful
- full and even passionate
- regular and really free
- demi-theological
- general and dangerous
- fierce and tiresome
- intricate and unsettled
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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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