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 expedition

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

  • british punitive
  • naval astronomical
  • imminent colonial
  • actual fact-finding
  • peaceful exploratory
  • little camping-out
  • present three-part
  • disastrous sicilian
  • futile piddling
  • stubborn and boisterous
  • asiatic zooelogical
  • second asiatic
  • spirited but disastrous
  • generally young and ill
  • illegal and ill-fated
  • distant and apparently dangerous
  • own long-planned
  • perhaps unmanageable
  • stronger, safer
  • formal exploratory
  • grand philological
  • insolent and impolitic
  • brief camping-out
  • legendary risky
  • well-prepared, well-equipped
  • modest manned
  • little altruistic
  • all-day herbal
  • anomalous and fatal
  • wickedly eccentric
  • adventurous and memorable
  • pathetic, ludicrous
  • enormous amphibious
  • last punitive
  • fifth major
  • quick punitive
  • tedious and somewhat perilous
  • forthcoming interstellar
  • mad, inhuman
  • adventurous and extraordinary
  • adventurous and unprecedented
  • disastrous and almost fatal
  • asiatic zo�logical
  • extensive punitive
  • ill-fated sicilian
  • provinces--naval
  • abortive african
  • judicious and enterprising
  • disastrous overseas
  • second khedivial
  • generally young
  • unfortunate sicilian
  • norwegian scientific
  • last, practical
  • unsuccessful dutch
  • exozoological
  • occasional diurnal
  • mighty but unsuccessful
  • joint lunar
  • ambitious exploratory
  • undoubtedly fruitful
  • almost unlawful
  • tempting military
  • great and long-planned
  • rather wild and romantic
  • dangerous and most rapid
  • late inefficient
  • ill-fated archaeological
  • well-equipped and dauntless
  • ill-starred naval
  • entirely scientific
  • distant and somewhat hazardous
  • perilous and frightful
  • modern polar
  • equally glorious and interesting
  • furtive amatory
  • punitive military
  • aimless and senseless
  • next manned
  • solemn scientific
  • long punitive
  • increasingly disillusioning
  • manned formal
  • greatest botanical
  • full-scale scientific
  • ukrainian polar
  • next exploratory
  • costliest military
  • thirteenth-century religious
  • secret polar
  • distant and hopeless
  • ill-fated punitive
  • allegedly punitive
  • long and ultimately disappointing
  • ultimately disappointing
  • ultimately ill-fated
  • insane and ill-starred
  • larger, lumbering
  • current such
  • present athenian

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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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