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 elephants
Below is a list of describing words for elephants. 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 elephants:
- flaccid olive-green
- cloudy, sky-high
- organic damn
- full-grown asiatic
- full-size asiatic
- hairy purple
- extinct hairy
- mammoth or fossil
- gigantic northern
- ancestral white
- smallest full-grown
- ostrich and stewed
- melancholy mad
- monstrous male
- small, docile
- particularly fierce and mischievous
- towering imperial
- splendid furious
- unwieldy but smaller
- single but very large
- colossal african
- virtuous noble
- middle-sized gray
- vicious rogue
- benevolent, serene
- irrelevant benevolent
- full-grown himalayan
- remarkably quiet and docile
- gigantic, green
- archaic meridional
- lumbering, coloured
- shaggy arctic
- spare royal
- mammoth or hairy
- usually tame
- magical or illusory
- well-trained tame
- frivolous, gentle
- ever-present, ponderous
- hairy northern
- male rogue
- immense and scrawny
- mammoth and modern
- mobile muscular
- tame african
- naturally docile and gentle
- black asiatic
- well-trained and amiable
- large rogue
- fine rogue
- tallest african
- idiotic female
- tertiary, southern
- bulky but docile
- solitary stray
- rogue wild
- famous luminous
- tall victorious
- swift female
- municipal white
- docile well-trained
- oldest, wisest and largest
- mammoth and primeval
- large and dusky
- full-grown african
- largest african
- mythical mundane
- stale pale
- shabby great
- always tame
- saggy baggy
- bright mauve
- notorious rogue
- ancient hairy
- infernal white
- jolly blue
- huge african
- fast african
- twenty-mile long
- violent angry
- formidably armored
- large intrusive
- often tame
- large waxen
- sometimes tame
- legendary fifth
- treacherous tame
- goddamned smart
- big asiatic
- sick or infirm
- alternate white
- distant pregnant
- also mad
- lame stupid
- tame, steady
- famed siberian
- powerful tame
- fatter-than-normal
- three-ton invisible
- huge docile
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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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