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 duration
Below is a list of describing words for duration. 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 duration:
- real and poetical
- successive or temporal
- fleeting but irresistible
- limited and short
- short present
- exceptionally brief
- happily temporary
- uncertain and short
- perfect permanent
- permanent and successive
- real but indivisible
- permanent or unchanging
- average and probable
- unknown and probably great
- long or sure
- simply endless
- ^sonal
- distressingly uncertain
- positive, eternal
- constant and indeterminate
- momentary or short
- perceptibly shorter
- probable long
- long or certain
- unequal but possibly enormous
- short and almost momentary
- average proportional
- fugitive and frail
- imply eternal
- uncertain but very long
- comparatively impassible
- brief individual
- well-known expansive
- brief and equal
- unlimited past
- customary maximum
- longest permissible
- long but undetermined
- peculiarly brief
- necessarily intelligent and all-knowing
- definite and considerable
- indefinite, unimaginable
- impersonal and total
- consequent limited
- indivisible undivided
- unchangeable or rather fictitious
- anterior eternal
- posterior eternal
eternal - longest average
- least average
- effectively endless
- unreal and spectral
- maximum two-minute
- entire and seemingly endless
- everlasting and permanent
- intensely long
- mere everlasting
- uncomfortably protracted
- positively appalling
- absolutely unending
- indefinite or infinite
- short total
- necessarily intelligent
- extraordinarily brief
- entire apparent
- temporally limited
- arrival, probable
- limited maximum
- unchanging and eternal
- longer average
- possibly enormous
- exact angular
- short and impressive
- perpetual, unbroken
- mere makeshift
- absolutely greatest
- maximum statutory
- rather fictitious
- essentially permanent
- pure blank
- hopefully brief
- fly long
- possible societal
- altogether enormous
- soft herbaceous
- unconscionable long
- shortest conceivable
- infinite or unlimited
- practically eternal
- abstract or metaphysical
- possible entire
- largest average
- obstinate and inveterate
- probable minimum
- inherently limited
- average menstrual
- other limited
- such short
- sadly short
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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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