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 essay
Below is a list of describing words for essay. 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 essay:
- introductory ethnological
- fair and thoughtful
- exhaustive and critical
- sublime fragmentary
- introductory ethnographical
- sober literary
- brilliant but misleading
- _tritical
- timid and unsuspected
- famous conservative
- ridiculous descriptive
- lighthearted rollicking
- historical, philosophical and practical
- highly intelligent and critical
- instructive short
- ready zeal
- feeble and too hasty
- nurserical
- instructive introductory
- interesting introductory
- modest and brief
- hauntingly elegiacal
- deplorably inadequate
- symbolic final
- nay posthumous
- viciously difficult
- late linguistic
- primarily philological
- late and primarily philological
- excellent and classic
- discursive familiar
- critical philosophic
- preliminary and extra-judicial
- meritorious illustrative
- shallow deistical
- good atheistic
- physico-grammatical
- pleasant and sane
- eloquent and comfortable
- fifth and fruitless
- ingenious but ineffectual
- omnibus and unfocused
- somewhat omnibus and unfocused
- somewhat omnibus
- latest unpublished
- single and disastrous
- timid nor indolent
- weighty, valuable
- provocative delightful
- personal informal
- chivalrous and pathetic
- enigmatic and rather frigid
- latest faint
- unknown and original
- witty, piquant
- rhetorically eloquent
- long and keenly comprehensive
- keenly comprehensive
- disgraceful, girlish
- brilliant but totally misleading
- excellent and concise
- oddly unsympathetic
- --bibliographical
- somewhat rhapsodic
- thoughtful and pleasing
- short but terse
- brief contemplative
- noble and affluent
- classic and most wonderful
- wordy, dry
- short complementary
- extremely inconclusive
- amusing and extremely inconclusive
- finely discursive
- absurdly grandiloquent
- long and absurdly grandiloquent
- trenchant discursive
- characteristically insightful
- urbane and eloquent
- moral, critical and personal
- fourth moral
- interesting and incisive
- urbane moral
- misleading and inaccurate
- prosaic theological
- exquisitely feline
- readable, authoritative
- strong, anti-slavery
- _historico-critical
- exhaustive and elegant
- single sophistical
- helpful and able
- fascinating and characteristic
- linear historical
- candid psychological
- able bibliographical
- notorious terminal
- charming and acute
- old ingenious
- remarkably incisive
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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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