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 drawings

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

  • practicable, simple and well-defined
  • careful botanical
  • unknown and unnameable
  • japanese pen-and-ink
  • sketchy, schematic
  • simple and well-defined
  • beautiful pen-and-ink
  • complex anatomical
  • downright dreadful
  • full-page pen-and-ink
  • horrible and mystic
  • neat and unmistakable
  • excellent anatomical
  • accurate composite
  • precise schematic
  • actual colored
  • superbly realistic
  • skilful, pertinent
  • several pen-and-ink
  • bald architectural
  • equal first-rate
  • admirably fantastic
  • curious topographical
  • vigorous mural
  • uncolored zoological
  • indeed stiff and grotesque
  • cubic black-and-white
  • sundry succinct
  • little but topographical
  • beautifully precise and neat
  • coloured and black-and-white
  • quite graphic
  • latest architectural
  • ethereal silvery
  • clean clinical
  • romantic, pastoral
  • colored pen-and-ink
  • uniquely horrific
  • fine pen-and-ink
  • exquisite marginal
  • masterly pen-and-ink
  • spirited and accurate
  • ordinary emblematical
  • accurate mechanical
  • masterly full-page
  • often spirited
  • good and often spirited
  • similar or almost identical
  • graceful and suggestive
  • also sectional and other
  • unfinished charcoal
  • fresh architectural
  • graceful, facile
  • highly indicative
  • entirely beautiful and wonderful
  • interesting pen-and-ink
  • sufficiently open and clear
  • sarcastic and serious
  • incorrect ideal
  • least, linear
  • original black-and-white
  • first-class coloured
  • careful older
  • numerous pen-and-ink
  • likely preparatory
  • exuberantly comic
  • worthless original
  • picturesque sepia
  • bold, freehand
  • faithfully coloured
  • humorous and extremely clever
  • sectional and complete
  • unnamed, thoughtful
  • fewer meretricious
  • characteristic and undoubtedly brilliant
  • superb but useless
  • inimitably grotesque
  • fragmentary and unfinished
  • elusive and imaginative
  • rough hideous
  • numerous sepia
  • clever black-and-white
  • letter--several
  • clever coloured
  • reproducible or permanent
  • twenty-seven original
  • dainty marginal
  • careful pen-and-ink
  • strangely ingenious and artistic
  • heraldic coloured
  • more sepia
  • rough professional
  • bold, glorious
  • distinct and extremely correct
  • pen-and-ink topographical
  • comic and obscene
  • precise celestial
  • bold pen-and-ink
  • fine illustrative
  • rough coloured

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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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