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 emphasis
Below is a list of describing words for emphasis. 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 emphasis:
- deliberate and genuine
- great respectful
- nebulous and peculiar
- tiniest extra
- sudden and theatrical
- slightest theatrical
- plebeian and naive
- slow, emotional
- sulphurous wrathful
- vocal or repetitive
- additional and horrid
- tiny but distinguishable
- fierce, deliberate
- impatient and unforgiving
- childish and yet passionate
- louder and stronger
- slight, inquiring
- unconsciously rude
- faintest weighted
- fiery poetic
- reasonable or emotional
- merciless and shocking
- excessive and ever-increasing
- rhythmic and metrical
- bitter and peculiar
- ultimately immoral
- fine scornful
- correct, impassioned
- slow and startling
- delicate, neutral
- fundamentally cartesian
- flat and somehow uncanny
- imperceptibly solemn
- high poignant
- cold and fateful
- guttural, military
- distinct and heavy
- eager and happier
- speech--personal
- immense and sincere
- slow and intense
- gentle and personal
- calm, incontrovertible
- fourth, weighty
- sudden and scarcely perceptible
- urbanely mournful
- additionally suggestive
- solemn but unyielding
- unheard-of speculative
- plaintive and very positive
- intentional and decisive
- dry and cranky
- slow and ironic
- vicious and significant
- life--special
- thrilling and bitter
- slightest self-conscious
- special and loving
- present, greater
- sulky and noisy
- slight but malicious
- deliberate scathing
- erroneously exceptional
- jocosely significant
- strong deliberate
- ever sadder
- bold, deliberate
- bold or inspiring
- sulphurous, wrathful
- slightly unnecessary
- equal and tedious
- slow and ironical
- sudden and irritable
- strong final
- ancient but absurd
- genuine, hospitable
- provokingly ironical
- solemn and even haughty
- unnecessarily explosive
- piscatorial dogmatic
- reckless scenic
- terrible and deliberate
- faintest ironical
- humorous and abrupt
- dramatic and false
- sure and well-placed
- excessive and quite fundamental
- much operatic
- literal and conventional
- delicate sinister
- pompous mortal
- correspondingly small
- correspondingly small or great
- odd and almost unbelievable
- calm but considerable
- mournful and significant
- slightest dramatic
- characteristic direct
- huge ironical
- indescribably sarcastic
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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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