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 disposition
Below is a list of describing words for disposition. 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 disposition:
- crusty, uncomfortable
- preternaturally careful
- sour, capricious
- irritable and quarrelsome
- possibly simple
- sociable and possibly simple
- unthinking military
- naturally cheerful and optimistic
- unquiet and impetuous
- truly modest and amiable
- eminently cheerful and hopeful
- naturally warm and affectionate
- docile, grateful
- cheerful, unsentimental
- natural haughty
- pious and contemplative
- quiet and ordinarily mild
- loquacious and genial
- avaricious and oppressive
- eager and sensual
- naturally unselfish
- naturally easy and indolent
- naturally malign
- legal, local
- ordinarily sweet and gentle
- gentle and optimistic
- warm and amorous
- amiable and most useful
- present chivalrous
- pliant and obliging
- naturally impulsive
- naturally romantic and ardent
- heavy and lazy
- harsh, resentful
- fundamentally docile
- subtle and loquacious
- litigious, uncompromising
- beguiling and sweet
- basically sunny
- aggressive and narrow
- vague energetic
- amiable or estimable
- indolent and submissive
- buoyant and humorous
- jocund hospitable
- wild, volatile
- naturally unselfish and affectionate
- suspicious and nervous
- cheery, cooperative
- morose, sulky
- adventurously reckless
- sullen obdurate
- untoward, intractable
- soft but fairly cheerful
- increasingly waspish
- purest virtuous
- wild inhuman
- black or malign
- innately placid
- morose and quarrelsome
- perverse, restive
- quarrelsome and malignant
- undeniably amiable
- savage and uncommunicative
- fickle and mutinous
- merciful and royal
- revolutionary and turbulent
- present hearty
- open communicative
- slothful and languid
- peculiarly gay
- pacific and rather timid
- cheerful, active and amiable
- active and amiable
- timorous, jealous
- restless, impulsive
- ever-changing lunar
- inert and lazy
- exceptionally optimistic
- highly suspicious and nervous
- singularly unsocial
- unfortunate and jealous
- unusually devout
- gentle and righteous
- bold and uneasy
- ancient favorable
- hopeful and sunshiny
- anxious or ambitious
- naturally austere
- serene and pacific
- exclusive ultimate
- liberal extravagant
- solitary and indolent
- sudden and classic
- easy, prodigal
- dreamy and reticent
- rather dreamy and reticent
- liberal or benevolent
- greedy, grudging
- unlimited and perpetual
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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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