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 explanation
Below is a list of describing words for explanation. 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 explanation:
- fair allegorical
- entire charming
- convincing and unexciting
- simple, deterministic
- conjectural and unsatisfactory
- particularly benign
- natural hypothetical
- interesting and quite logical
- imprudent or sudden
- common teleological
- modern, logical
- consistent and fairly probable
- subtle and bizarre
- lame ventriloquial
- phsyiological
- long phsyiological
- curious but certainly correct
- satisfactory rational
- plausible and rational
- simple, palatable
- satisfactory and philosophical
- remarkable and sensible
- excessively burlesque
- indispensable and circumstantial
- concise and seemingly plausible
- halfway convincing
- long moralistic
- subsequent and most satisfactory
- favorite liberal
- easier and clearer
- ideally universal
- painful and interesting
- fullest and bravest
- slow, simplified
- slyly technical
- transparent biological
- racist biological
- ready or sensible
- inept and incredible
- convoluted psychological
- coherent ideological
- hazardous and unpleasant
- equally glib
- tolerable or probable
- real satisfactory
- reasonable and material
- clear and eager
- _ir_rational
- dramatic and lucid
- scanty unconnected
- long and partial
- less far-fetched
- lofty and wonderful
- discreet imaginable
- miserably lame
- proper or satisfactory
- humanitarian and universalistic
- nice, glib
- full rational
- fairly probable
- perfectly resonable
- adequate but horrible
- simple and perfectly correct
- terribly glib
- traditionally rational
- overly convoluted
- old sociobiological
- long and soulful
- theoretical or conscious
- supernaturally intelligent
- sensible all-around
- completely murky
- valid, convincing
- ingenious and sufficiently probable
- scientific and reasonable
- brisk, mutual
- causal or mechanical
- simple but highly ingenious
- obvious and creditable
- ancient word-for-word
- new but very distinct
- inadequate philosophical
- accurate and sufficiently wide
- swift, technical
- unanswerably rational
- consistent and appropriate
- ridiculously philosophical
- submissive and satisfactory
- authentic rational
- shallow, rationalistic
- shallow rationalistic
- reasonable or possible
- moderately plausible
- allegorical mystic
- savage scientific
- probable hypothetical
- probable, coherent
- dull and pitiful
- false, literal
- unnatural or unfounded
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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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