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 encouragement
Below is a list of describing words for encouragement. 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 encouragement:
- already hooting
- greatest providential
- perfectly unpretentious
- immediate and auspicious
- approval and mutual
- triumphant, great
- liberal and unparalleled
- substantial and sufficient
- conventional and commonplace
- quietly clandestine
- welcome and gratifying
- direct or intentional
- little heavy-handed
- blasphemous and scatological
- unrestrained and intimate
- back raucous
- liveliest financial
- grudging, slight
- cheery and brave
- indefinite, all-powerful
- substantial official
- perfectly legitimate and commendable
- heartiest and kindest
- benevolent and strenuous
- signal and helpful
- voluble and spicy
- constant and life-long
- spontaneous and honorable
- gruff, teutonic
- cautious, half-hearted
- systematic false
- direct and highly immoral
- gaudy and overweening
- unsolicited and liberal
- poems--governmental
- frivolous impulsive
- direct and generous
- strangely inspiring
- real and discerning
- object--incidental
- definite or material
- vaguest and wildest
- gentle and consistent
- bland and unconscious
- divinely sympathetic
- most substantial
- greatest and most effectual
- valuable and real
- due national
- direct and overwhelming
- such charismatic
- sufficiently generous
- back constant
- hardly total
- wonderful, continual
- usually jocose
- bright inexperienced
- ciously eager
- constant choral
- secret but most powerful
- also tacit
- extremely carnal
- phony last-minute
- precious and grateful
- warm official
- legitimate and commendable
- vehement outspoken
- further and warm
- necessary monetary
- sufficient monetary
- entire dynamic
- subtle, heartless
- discreetly sympathetic
- likewise additional
- indirect and eventual
- generous and unparalleled
- contrary much
- merest rough
- incessant mutual
- constant and cordial
- aforesaid public
- much tacit
- little merciful
- further legislative
- gentle and genteel
- universal and indiscriminate
- silent but emphatic
- sincere and gentle
- cordial and constant
- animated and inspiring
- official papal
- short and energetic
- great and effectual
- quite slight
- blissful spiritual
- little and very poor
- silent soft
- impartial and universal
- necessary mutual
- steady and liberal
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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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