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 exaggerations

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

  • undoubtedly wild
  • sumptuous and stagnant
  • best, grotesque
  • trifling and cold-blooded
  • trifling and many
  • little authorial
  • wrily humorous
  • polite sacramental
  • pleasing and harmless
  • gross and tasteless
  • humorous or petulant
  • mostly absurd
  • monstrous numerical
  • malignant and ludicrous
  • little gradual
  • unbounded and absurd
  • inevitable rhetorical
  • gross irrational
  • much credulous
  • sickly romantic
  • painfully juvenile
  • frequent and grotesque
  • sentimental and rhetorical
  • ingenious and one-sided
  • anxious and undisguised
  • merely gross
  • systematic conventional
  • various and astounding
  • purely bucolic
  • splendid or fearful
  • habitual limitless
  • trifling and unconscious
  • pardonable rhetorical
  • certain unintended
  • gross but glorious
  • permissible certain
  • obvious playful
  • aerial, ridiculous
  • little allowable
  • untrue or utter
  • slight but very popular
  • mainly untrue or utter
  • plausible and practical
  • direct and clumsy
  • burlesque, angry
  • uncritical and enthusiastic
  • pardonable and proper
  • unreal and terrific
  • perfectly pardonable and proper
  • fearless and extreme
  • dark, enigmatical
  • aside obvious and inevitable
  • ordinary inventive
  • aside obvious
  • illegitimate literary
  • main but natural
  • curious and credulous
  • mere spirited
  • clearly gross
  • numerical and optimistic
  • natural but pardonable
  • entirely patriotic
  • humorous or bizarre
  • sheer affectionate
  • outrageous and even ridiculous
  • perverse, intentional
  • manifestly conscious or unconscious
  • manifestly conscious
  • greater rhetorical
  • rhetorical or poetic
  • pardonable or unintentional
  • lunar festival
  • frigid and almost hysterical
  • partial poetical
  • vain and credulous
  • pardonable little
  • vague, turgid
  • natural, artificial
  • humorous or dramatic
  • intentional and humorous
  • sometimes intentional
  • noble, urbane
  • other garish
  • typical satanic
  • doubtful conversational
  • bombastic and obscure
  • partly simple
  • always fantastic
  • mischievous, dangerous
  • weak such
  • racy, piquant
  • great and opposite
  • amazing poetical
  • improper and fantastic
  • frequent strange
  • fantastic and unnatural
  • excusable, poetical
  • ridiculous and malicious
  • perfectly pardonable
  • mainly untrue

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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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