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 excellence
Below is a list of describing words for excellence. 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 excellence:
- verbal and labial
- last or total
- corresponding corporeal
- chirographical and moral
- innate and personal
- exalted and unmatched
- equally high and unbroken
- permanent and memorable
- initial or specific
- monotonous average
- wonderful or high
- artistic or technical
- acute limited
- solid, unimpeachable
- bloodless, distant
- literary and typographical
- hazardous and ambiguous
- refined ethical
- exquisite and overpowering
- radical and inalienable
- worth, moral
- stupendous and almost unnatural
- unattainable or exclusive
- innocent and matchless
- fair and unfamiliar
- gruesome, repulsive
- trans-emotional
- splendid and imperishable
- sweet deluded
- one-sided moral
- rich and technical
- last, matchless
- indeed unattainable
- lofty and indeed unattainable
- high and unbroken
- imaginative and immaculate
- uncompromising technical
- longer moral
- worldly good or human
- worldly good
- actual pictorial
- haunting and peculiar
- all-round artistic
- prime and indisputable
- inferior but great
- splendid and consummate
- common convivial
- original painstaking
- inherent and individual
- theoretically attainable
- delectable and glorious
- distant, ineffable
- unsurpassed and dazzling
- high pedagogical
- also unpopular
- fresh endearing
- exalted and overpowering
- exquisite and lyrical
- literary and even scientific
- superlative technical
- paltry oriental
- expedient, moral
- high metrical
- musical or mental
- sole characteristic
- much transcendant
- consummate and unparalleled
- worth and poetical
- merely manipulative
- rarer, greater
- always limited and imperfect
- abstract feminine
- noblest and most exquisite
- uncouth such
- rare average
- excellent, more
- chief and most prominent
- infinitely transcendent
- devotional and poetical
- appropriate and distinctive
- central literary
- such culinary
- equal descriptive
- cal and moral
- cooperative technical
- abstract artistic
- ultimate cultural
- ‘‘technical
- subsequent rhetorical
- exterior and moral
- high and almost singular
- unaided moral
- quite comparable
- highest and most peculiar
- true god-like
- striking or peculiar
- unusual individual
- good or human
- rich graphic
- surprising and indeed unique
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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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