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 elite

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

  • influential haitian
  • small metanational
  • small, worldwide
  • liberal cultural
  • administrative, commercial and scientific
  • small, corrupt
  • ruthless, self-proclaimed
  • swiss, german and french
  • homogeneous human
  • digital underground
  • steadily smaller and more
  • ambitious, perceptive
  • outstanding asiatic
  • utterly incorruptible
  • influential intellectual
  • wealthy, bright
  • hypocritical conservative
  • jumped-up social
  • indonesian political
  • moneyed, well-educated
  • second territorial
  • well-heeled internationalist
  • moneyed and influential
  • all-powerful hard-core
  • fabulously wealthy and powerful
  • powerful bureaucratic
  • university-educated medical
  • tiny olympian
  • aristocratic, military
  • managerial and technocratic
  • snobbish intellectual
  • industrial and naval
  • permanent and enlightened
  • self-proclaimed new
  • so-called rich
  • self-appointed cultural
  • self-styled intellectual
  • fascist political
  • ideological or religious
  • non-religious, intellectual
  • steadily smaller
  • metanational
  • tiny european
  • tiny aristocratic
  • peculiarly enthusiastic
  • also imperial
  • pompous, condescending
  • terrifying and fascinating
  • commercial and scientific
  • political or intellectual
  • astute military
  • effete and decadent
  • riminal
  • academic scientific
  • mathematical and technical
  • pakistani
  • corporate and financial
  • scientific-technological
  • small genetic
  • intelligent and scientific
  • cultural and intellectual
  • active and eager
  • former soviet
  • personal military
  • small clerical
  • greatest magical
  • technocratic
  • bloody french
  • small intellectual
  • military and scientific
  • spanish-born
  • jewish religious
  • loyal imperial
  • ethical and intellectual
  • small but vital
  • permanent military
  • less such
  • intellectual and physical
  • tall, angular
  • lectual
  • hermetic
  • privileged
  • haitian
  • rather sinister
  • internationalist
  • self-perpetuating
  • same royal
  • fabulously wealthy
  • refined and cultured
  • political and cultural
  • moneyed
  • fabulously rich
  • local political
  • intellectual
  • untouchable
  • political and intellectual
  • still rarer
  • new military
  • social and cultural
  • social and financial

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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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