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 elevations

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

  • mostly rough and mountainous
  • volcanic, mountainous
  • highest and most advantageous
  • mostly inaccessible
  • mostly rugged and mountainous
  • south-central interior
  • green and precipitous
  • slow and recent
  • subsequent and gradual
  • mostly low and flat
  • recent and precarious
  • latest, unwanted
  • slight sudden
  • continual and diligent
  • rocky, volcanic
  • mountainous interior
  • mostly rugged
  • circumscribed, solid
  • gradual but very slight
  • gentle, picturesque
  • continuous puffy
  • low and very distant
  • unexpectedly humble
  • repetitive rear
  • steep but narrow
  • ingeniously dizzy
  • perceptible natural
  • steady and unconscious
  • higher and abrupt
  • smaller but still enormous
  • upland flat-topped
  • --_congenital
  • compact, high and spacious
  • partial permanent
  • giddy and anxious
  • difficult and most airy
  • peculiar abrupt
  • imaginary or fantastic
  • gentle and wooded
  • barometrical or trigonometrical
  • coastal plain
  • precarious and invidious
  • ritual, ceremonial
  • frank and pure
  • cooler, higher
  • purely igneous or volcanic
  • perilous spiritual
  • rugged extensive
  • often hazardous and unpredictable
  • rugged or rocky
  • windy aerial
  • circumscribed epidermal
  • truest poetic
  • vast and giddy
  • steep and singular
  • central vesicular
  • cold, deceptive
  • exterior lateral
  • terrestrio-celestial
  • lofty chalky
  • absurd and wearisome
  • abrupt or precipitous
  • continual but slow
  • trifling rocky
  • gradual mystical
  • picturesque and gigantic
  • fine, gradual
  • well-defined tubercular
  • precipitous or dangerous
  • reddish, warty
  • tranquil, childlike
  • north considerable
  • slow measurable
  • precarious and illusory
  • decent and noble
  • gradual and low
  • longitudinal smooth
  • consistent and unflagging
  • high sublunary
  • domestic, social and individual
  • previous and commensurate
  • alternately extreme
  • lofty wind-swept
  • circumscribed, reddish
  • periodical and gradual
  • slow circumferential
  • stupendous east
  • same coronal
  • next moderate
  • stern and almost supercilious
  • inaccessible and calm
  • simultaneous rear
  • sudden and unsuitable
  • never mental
  • antenasal fatty
  • huge and tall
  • favorable and precipitous
  • modern and apparently local
  • safe and minimum
  • perfectly natural and intelligible

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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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