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 earnest
Below is a list of describing words for earnest. 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 earnest:
- eager or more
- fanciful, more
- serious, bitter
- zealous, more
- deep, well-founded
- creative and more
- downright sober
- awake, more
- fearful historic
- painfully innocent
- endearing and more
- far fiercer and more
- charming nervous
- awful, wretched
- real, sober
- tedious nor more
- fiercer, more and more
- sad literal
- awful, grim
- persuasive, more
- terrific quiet
- thereby wiser
- thereby wiser and more
- deep, less
- downright literal
- appeal more
- considerate divine
- now prosperous and more
- sympathetic, more
- grim and real
- absolute and sober
- eager and more
- extraordinarily pale
- vague and far less
- quiet unpleasant
- graceful, mild
- sober, literal
- profound and desolate
- solid serious
- solemn and bitter
- ridiculous and offensive
- relevant and more
- fervent, academic
- serious and even more
- fairly angry
- sad and stupid
- restless and less
- serious quiet
- real, tropical
- good sad
- tedious or more
- grim, grim
- potent or more
- real and bustling
- interesting and perhaps more
- dire, dangerous
- eager serious
- dead sober
- vociferous, more
- solemn and stupid
- painful, serious
- zeal but more
- faithful, more
- forceful, more
- awful and literal
- strange such
- true and sober
- real and affectionate
- sad sober
- noisy and more
- cleaner, more
- bloody and warlike
- still stronger and more
- never sweeter or more
- beautiful, impulsive
- sincere or more
- zeal, much
- passionate and more
- devilish deep
- reasonable and more
- intimate and more
- sweet and sad
- untouched many
- utter and solemn
- dead and utter
- confidential fluent
- real, dead
- steady and more
- sad and deep
- honest and more
- prosperous and more
- serious, solemn
- |real
- certain, much
- dead, sober
- deep, young
- clear, deep-set
- violent, less
- cruel and less
- gradually less
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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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