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 essays
Below is a list of describing words for essays. 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 essays:
- introductory ethnological
- _anthropological
- fair and thoughtful
- vigorous, socialistic
- elizabethan critical
- exhaustive and critical
- selected historical
- =critical and miscellaneous
- sublime fragmentary
- introductory ethnographical
- personal, militant
- sturdy and workmanlike
- linguistic and oriental
- other irreverent
- journal and ethical
- sober literary
- psycho-sociological
- critical and miscellaneous
- brilliant but misleading
- statesmanlike, impartial
- _tritical
- free-wheeling philosophical
- timid and unsuspected
- dizzyingly provocative
- famous conservative
- lighter periodical
- ridiculous descriptive
- desultory moral
- _critical and historical
- facetious political
- --critical and historical
- previous light-hearted
- loose, anonymous
- amusing and epigrammatic
- geometrical and geographical
- desultory and unacknowledged
- introductory and critical
- commendable little
- grimly satiric
- lighthearted rollicking
- brilliant, periodical
- historical, philosophical and practical
- notable interpretive
- highly intelligent and critical
- necessarily independent
- instructive short
- --_critical and historical
- ready zeal
- occasional and moral
- feeble and too hasty
- countless conjectural
- nurserical
- critical and topographical
- instructive introductory
- humorous impartial
- shorter literary
- placid literary
- critical & historical
- interesting introductory
- =critical
- modest and brief
- narrative and miscellaneous
- ambitious, literary
- little diurnal
- aspiring comic
- _moral
- hauntingly elegiacal
- biological & geological
- deplorably inadequate
- limited, several
- symbolic final
- minor rhetorical
- nay posthumous
- admirable periodical
- viciously difficult
- impulsive, capricious
- late linguistic
- crabbed controversial
- primarily philological
- mencken--highly improper
- late and primarily philological
- miniature and other
- excellent and classic
- slender, trifling
- discursive familiar
- fantastically joyous
- critical philosophic
- riotous and fantastically joyous
- preliminary and extra-judicial
- arrogantly gay
- meritorious illustrative
- sardonic and arrogantly gay
- shallow deistical
- graceful but perfectly unsatisfactory
- good atheistic
- runaway and other
- physico-grammatical
- luminous, penetrating
- pleasant and sane
- pleasant thoughtful
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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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