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 error
Below is a list of describing words for error. 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 error:
- understandable but foolish
- broadest and most prevalent
- emotional exquisite
- gross and avowed
- boulogne--general
- obvious typographical
- willful religious
- trial and tragic
- mad perceptual
- grave tactical
- sixfold simultaneous
- old and incompatible
- gross but common
- spare them--fatal
- fatal tactical
- serious tactical
- disastrous and avoidable
- monstrous bureaucratic
- inherent observational
- gross positional
- weak and monstrous
- profound connubial
- bad, momentous
- mere typographical
- vile temporary
- trifling inadvertent
- minor, technical
- maximum positional
- unfortunate tactical
- consequent vulgar
- fatal and palpable
- india--political
- india--political and social
- critical and fatal
- possible typographical
- possible fractional
- great and gross
- teckinal
- perilous but temporary
- primary vulgar
- short incomprehensible
- cumulative gross
- embarrassing typographical
- glaring basic
- single typographic
- stupid algebraic
- incomprehensible journalistic
- gross and fatal
- single typographical
- trifling, venial
- great, prolific
- opposite and perverse
- wholly opposite and perverse
- chief and common
- singular and palpable
- editorial or typographic
- hideous, absurd
- insidious and plausible
- morbid and scholastic
- good or self-assertive
- fortunate, fatal
- trifling and tolerable
- manifest and wicked
- serious and unfortunate
- slight but pardonable
- peculiar, essential and fundamental
- mighty and progressive
- emergent or antagonistic
- general and double
- worse, flagrant
- evil, doctrinal
- evil or doctrinal
- popular sanitary
- long-established and popular
- possibly typographical
- equally god-forsaken
- reluctant and involuntary
- poor, thine
- gross tactical
- glaring, obvious
- profound strategic
- unjust and grievous
- palpable and absurd
- clear typographic
- clerical or typographical
- simple typographical
- definite tactical
- typographical
- great and most sinful
- damn clerical
- dreadful, strategic
- trial and often hideous
- stupid logistic
- vaguely substantive
- dreadful intellectual
- common and most awkward
- least usual
- typically obtuse
- costly historical
- shocking logical
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
