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 existence
Below is a list of describing words for existence. 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 existence:
- spontaneous massive
- tranquil bloodthirsty
- aimless and stupid
- rather aimless and stupid
- human bloody
- dreamy rural
- important corporeal
- useless, lecherous
- everyday person-to-person
- bare and brutish
- easy, romantic
- uncertain, strenuous
- unworthy mutinous
- previous day-by-day
- volitional and muscular
- seal, perpetual
- brilliant and miserable
- former actual
- substantial and impossible
- equally substantial and impossible
- sad, pallid
- independent and feverishly busy
- grotesque social
- easy, unchanging
- brisk uncertain
- foul, empty
- day-to-day squalid
- materially empty
- murderously amoral
- pedestrian, day-to-day
- supernatural and wonderful
- false dual
- independent, inalienable
- wholly bucolic
- mysterious and delectable
- gratuitous total
- tough sordid
- wayward and impatient
- faint and bare
- formative material
- endless pastel
- spiritually collective
- hard, combative
- absolute or external
- eventful and heroic
- tranquil private
- mobile, functional
- entire immature
- prospective romantic
- imperfect and dangerous
- effective and undeniable
- hard and materially empty
- prosaic, uncomplicated
- permanent expatriate
- fugitive and turbulent
- carefree, pampered
- uncomfortably barbaric
- satisfying, happy
- incandescent and satisfying
- curiously incandescent and satisfying
- curiously incandescent
- enormously fast-paced and frenetic
- enormously fast-paced
- shocking clandestine
- former momentary
- drowsy, indolent
- longer conscious
- independent substantial
- otherwise circumscribed
- cosmopolitan and blissful
- commonplace and unmolested
- expensive and useful
- rustic poetical
- mechanical and instinctive
- placid scientific
- negative, worthless
- drowsy and secret
- current empty
- pre-terrestrial
- perfectly finite
- possibly gentler
- trivial sordid
- happy and not undesirable
- entirely real-life
- rough, unstructured
- monotonous and meaningless
- adorable and delightful
- empty, sad
- brief and full
- tranquil and undisturbed
- tiresome and unexciting
- separate, hypothetical
- external or absolute
- external absolute
- joyless mere
- real, desolate
- already joyless
- dreary former
- somewhat indulgent
- constitutional and legitimate
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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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