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 experiences
Below is a list of describing words for experiences. 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 experiences:
- harrowing emotional
- considerable amatory
- good angelic
- exciting and terminal
- immensely exciting and terminal
- fairly repetitive
- amazing and rewarding
- bleak, arctic
- human practical
- more instructional
- sufficient planetary
- medical and ordinary
- anxious actual
- wonderful and scary
- entire awful
- terrifying and oppressive
- incredibly intimate and sensuous
- autobiographical personal
- marvelously dear
- remarkably harrowing
- experimental mystical
- transcendent mystical
- unimaginably various
- weirdly satisfying
- supposedly vast
- profoundly horrifying
- frustrating and demeaning
- thoroughly frustrating and demeaning
- wholly new and rare
- previous and practical
- unnatural personal
- relatively restful
- earlier perilous
- aesthetic tactile
- limited romantic
- private, wonderful
- genuinely mind-boggling
- meager maritime
- least peripheral
- perfectly happy and easy
- endless direct
- authentic psychic
- drowsy, happy
- immensely exciting
- previous painful
- trivial or tragic
- long and occasionally bitter
- baffling, strange and perilous
- untrespassably private
- simple and deceptive
- sometimes surreal
- memorable and rewarding
- milder and slighter
- standard start-up
- uncomfortable and uncanny
- damnably realistic
- common, hereditary
- macabre and romantic
- hard, nerve-racking
- brief matrimonial
- satisfying imaginative
- emotional and educational
- always faulty and imperfect
- recent woeful
- new and somewhat exhilarating
- strange and somewhat awful
- strenuous eager
- strange medical
- sad and frustrating
- parallel miniature
- pletely unique
- recent and ill-advised
- jolly unpleasant
- wide or very penetrating
- unpleasant and unbelievable
- quite new and interesting
- languid, surreal
- unhappy conjugal
- cruel or shameful
- unprecedented and incredible
- exhilarating and real
- practical, first-hand
- frustrating and fruitless
- sometimes rewarding
- wonderfully unexpected and intimate
- frightening, dreamlike
- intimate and sensuous
- considerable premarital
- sufficiently emotional
- decisive philosophic
- immediate intuitional
- cumulative religious
- particular and fragmentary
- actual hands-on
- limited direct
- valuable previous
- old acrobatic
- real and vicarious
- strictly joyless
- horrible past
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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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