Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 document

Below is a list of describing words for document. 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 document:

  • textual or visual
  • fake legal
  • lavishly complimentary
  • handsome voluntary
  • depressing legal
  • bravest political
  • curious civic
  • mere revolutionary
  • --original contemporary
  • mendacious and slanderous
  • statist legal
  • deplorable and shocking
  • otherwise deplorable and shocking
  • spurious, worthless
  • portentous blue
  • remarkable and amusing
  • solemn handwritten
  • deliberate and business-like
  • infallible official
  • voluminous typewritten
  • woefully crumpled
  • next contemporary
  • crisp, vigorous
  • comical fourth
  • dreary legal
  • purportedly authentic
  • ornately official
  • mysterious and hieroglyphical
  • sweet and quickly convertible
  • finally authentic
  • remarkable and unnoticed
  • secret and unpublished
  • unique and epoch-making
  • weighty and incomparable
  • immortal and unique
  • unexpected remarkable
  • misleading anthropological
  • singularly comic
  • once convincing
  • formidable, official
  • undoubtedly contemporary
  • authentic, contemporary
  • singularly short and simple
  • arbitrary, unchangeable
  • respectable and even pious
  • corrupt and most untrustworthy
  • suspicious western
  • remarkably politic
  • intensely poignant and dramatic
  • memorial or other
  • gratifying typewritten
  • small but tattered
  • merely revolutionary
  • solemn and eloquent
  • extremely complimentary
  • lengthy and extremely complimentary
  • fine and well-kept
  • glossy throwaway
  • prime legal
  • typical official
  • rumpled, sticky
  • holy historical
  • handwritten chinese
  • heretofore flawless
  • bizarrely short
  • notorious official
  • engrossed, magnificent
  • famous and much-maligned
  • quantitative political
  • primitive, undying
  • uncommonly barren
  • unique diplomatic
  • boldest anti-slavery
  • cynically candid
  • semi-legal florid
  • trustworthy natural
  • ineffectual and miserable
  • important and eloquent
  • precious crumpled
  • lucid and memorable
  • late fourth-century
  • logical, well-balanced
  • directly authoritative
  • long and important-looking
  • |theological
  • thoroughly respectful and courteous
  • earliest alphabetic
  • oldest phoenician
  • crabbed dim
  • abstruse dull
  • intricate crabbed
  • same congressional
  • famous and vexatious
  • sane and gratuitous
  • perfectly sane and gratuitous
  • equally short and simple
  • flimsy, theoretical
  • blank or partly blank
  • veritable legal
  • magnificently voluminous

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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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