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 distance
Below is a list of describing words for distance. 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 distance:
- easy striking
- featureless and shadowy
- familiarly short
- psychologically comfortable
- local and long
- reasonable striking
- travelled little
- careful six-foot
- incredible spatial
- extreme and incomparable
- devious and messy
- earlier conversational
- unmeasurably short
- dial long
- constant normal
- safe and respectful
- reasonable safe
- internarial
- fair striking
- hazy, blue-green
- immediate striking
- infinite subterranean
- considerable galactic
- airy, blue
- respectful but watchful
- equivalently shorter
- hopeless unattainable
- canine striking
- pure and enormous
- visibly sterile
- half-staff
- considerable and equal
- smallest astronomical
- immense, welcome
- somehow natural
- great but somehow natural
- imprecise but extensive
- safe but uneasy
- safely undetectable
- dangerous misty
- awfully inconvenient
- discrete and respectful
- proper focal
- reasonable ocular
- customary wistful
- hence relative
- hopeless, speechless
- unknown but surely considerable
- respectful and prudent
- hopeful safe
- blue romantic
- comfortable conversational
- far weary
- powerful but otherwise standard
- immediately worrisome
- least orbital
- fast striking
- huge semantic
- remote and purely imaginative
- far indistinguishable
- sensible but not inconvenient
- proportionate, inviolable
- arcual
- far algerian
- limited and variable
- immeasurable, irrevocable
- minimal spatial
- proper, respectful
- white, elusive
- maximum apparent
- necessary emotional
- respectful
- certain shivery
- odd pregnant
- own, cautious
- actual shortest
- mostly conversational
- actual straight-line
- safe and significant
- dim and airy
- tactful emotional
- greater, safer
- long, defensible
- short and respectable
- cautious but ready
- terrifyingly impressive
- precise, polite
- awkwardly long
- remote and sombre
- indeterminate but great
- safely private
- exact approximate
- deadly high
- exact safe
- extreme and dim
- cold, impassable
- utterly infinite or everlasting
- infinite or everlasting
- shortest admissible
- horizontal angular
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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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