Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 ethics

Below is a list of describing words for ethics. 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 ethics:

  • socioconstitutional
  • orthodox bourgeois
  • intuitive or rationalistic
  • rough-hewn, obsolete
  • wildly inconsistent
  • pedantic impossible
  • absolutely distinct and separate
  • altruistic or socialistic
  • purely altruistic or socialistic
  • indulgent and selfish
  • immeasurably worse
  • almost socialist
  • exceptional and very particular
  • scientific, speculative
  • habitual and instinctive
  • an--international
  • rational and rationalistic
  • ideal, an--international
  • positive and mundane
  • utilitarian or natural
  • alien and dogmatic
  • apparently fierce
  • savage unselfish
  • human, social and political
  • academic and human
  • individual or communal
  • evolutionary and idealistic
  • practical, individualistic
  • religious and even political
  • confidence--professional
  • self-sustaining traditional
  • mild and patriarchal
  • so-called neolithic
  • relative and imperfect
  • pure rationalistic
  • especially psychological
  • humble and pure
  • essential european
  • deep and even tragic
  • scientifically true
  • workable sexual
  • situational

  • antisocial cultural
  • med�cal
  • well-developed cooperative
  • bad journalistic
  • whole macho
  • traditional and valuable
  • situaaonal
  • maybe professional
  • own notional
  • slippery, self-serving
  • medical and environmental
  • environmental or ecological
  • best pagan
  • fine and practical
  • completely social
  • natural, rational and universal
  • dogmatic and conventional
  • angry and uncertain
  • hebraic religious
  • narrow small-town
  • metaphysical or transcendental
  • abstract revolutionary
  • so-called evolutional
  • dogmatic and speculative
  • newfound sexual
  • sturdy common-sense
  • deep and grand
  • plain social
  • whole transcendental
  • international human
  • special periodical
  • natural and theological
  • animal and sub-human
  • now theological
  • situational
  • old geocentric
  • old working-class
  • modern or mediaeval
  • ideal human
  • insanely stubborn
  • old monogamous
  • “situational
  • realistic social
  • false double
  • material and selfish
  • medical and public
  • successful evolutionary
  • new optimistic
  • genuine and rational
  • natural or universal
  • whole false
  • foolish human
  • chinese and buddhist
  • simple, savage
  • other and preternatural
  • old naturalistic
  • ambisexual
  • scientific and positive

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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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