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 efficacy
Below is a list of describing words for efficacy. 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 efficacy:
- potent and disastrous
- certain and victorious
- magical, non-causal
- universal and special
- mysterious or magical
- especial magical
- real and most certain
- exclusive and unnatural
- sacramental or mystical
- universal and sole
- immediate apparential
- ideal unimpeded
- intrinsic or proportionate
- rare and even magical
- compelling and magical
- universal curative
- disciplinary and moral
- partial present
- ever-increasing miraculous
- sure and methodical
- miserably partial
- frightful and deplorable
- apparent inexplicable
- less corrosive
- edly short-term
- actual evaporative
- non-causal
- divinely infinite
- overwhelming and instantaneous
- equal and greater
- subtle and solemn
- simple but amazing
- positive and independent
- superior ethical
- symbolic and instrumental
- possible dynamic
- essential sacramental
- precise spiritual
- remarkable medicinal
- apparential
- precious medicinal
- same causal
- whole causal
- educational and artistic
- wondrous medical
- mysterious and sovereign
- unknown, untried
- sovereign and eternal
- quasi-sacramental
- such all-pervading
- boundless spiritual
- much explanatory
- perfect conceivable
- direct and potent
- evaporative
- smaller religious
- distinct magical
- direct didactic
- great imaginary
- great suggestive
- already doubtful
- considerable medicinal
- certain causal
- mystical and spiritual
- special and specific
- natural and fundamental
- spiritual or moral
- serious spiritual
- temporary and limited
- such infallible
- purely magical
- general magical
- certain ethical
- antidotal
- vague and awful
- certain supernatural
- full practical
- sacramental
- causal
- lesser or greater
- high scientific
- certain magnetic
- powerful and irresistible
- --mechanical
- extremely doubtful
- direct spiritual
- same vicious
- same specific
- little practical
- strange spiritual
- scarce less
- reasonable good
- certain intrinsic
- immediate and practical
- medicinal
- absolute physical
- such dubious
- such impressive
- medical and legal
- more abiding
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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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