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 entities
Below is a list of describing words for entities. 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 entities:
- fabulous huge
- malevolent chemical
- animate and evil
- nameless, alien
- separate geographic
- weird inanimate
- immense self-contained
- super-rnagical
- other super-rnagical
- shadowy, enormous
- elder, outer
- separate, brittle
- four-dimensional temporary
- normally shapeless
- archetypal superior
- frightful amorphous
- powerless astral
- infamous cosmic
- extremely literal-minded
- positive and perpetual
- abiding psychical
- abstract and regular
- philosophical, peaceful
- single, sentient
- stubbornly complex
- armored, dominant
- unfamiliar mathematical
- legal, economic
- hostile paranormal
- extra-spatial, extra-temporal
- mentally weaker
- abstract graphic
- for-profit cultural
- sentient or merely conscious
- truly compatible
- complete immature
- divergent sentient
- merciless but able
- jealous smaller
- special, superior
- multiply logical
- complete, sentient
- self-contained political
- hypothetical subatomic
- equally insubstantial
- delicious, alien
- malicious cosmic
- passably sane
- cohesive political
- territorial and administrative
- certain mycological
- other super-magical
- unseen mechanical
- amorphous western
- absolutely discontinuous
- single, unreasoning
- certain bloodthirsty
- feral electronic
- alien, unknown
- totally synthetic
- corporate collective
- omnipresent immanent
- stagnant perfumed
- purely cultural and economic
- hopefully self-sufficient
- primal, individual
- governmental or nongovernmental
- real or super-real
- vaguely real or super-real
- vaguely real
- hypothetical unknowable
- shadowy parasitic
- namelessly monstrous
- gigantic primitive
- self-sustaining symbolic
- hostile, sentient
- contrary negative
- sophisticated conscious
- exclusive, antagonistic
- terrestrial legal
- ominous hybrid
- physically discorporeal
- purely probabilistic
- single and physically discorporeal
- organic psychotic
- powerful, alien
- irreducibly different
- trivial, anonymous
- such non-vital
- nice multisided
- rigid nosological
- single illusory
- intelligent and frequently individual
- coherent and persistent
- lower, servile
- enigmatic, godlike
- physical and measurable
- mature psychic
- superfluous metaphysical
- ambiguous national
Popular Searches
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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