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 expletives
Below is a list of describing words for expletives. 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 expletives:
- inappropriate and useless
- totally inappropriate and useless
- unnecessary and profane
- incomparably easier
- rich gaelic
- guilty but meaningless
- incoherent breathy
- unnecessary or offensive
- formidable and satisfying
- vile anglo-french
- angry and very audible
- thoughtlessly profane
- natural and rougher
- few admissible
- weird doric
- vehement british
- reasonably polite
- coarse spanish
- several edifying
- single, pungent
- descriptive deep-space
- explosive four-letter
- back colorful
- delightful off-color
- lusty spanish
- usual australian
- joyous french
- standard long-distance
- infrequent spanish
- hard and naughty
- best abusive
- exceedingly hard and naughty
- vehement and undisguised
- rather jocular
- completely incomprehensible
- same aimless
- muffled gaelic
- many and vivid
- simple and apparently harmless
- profane and violent
- bitter dry
- further characteristic
- single four-letter
- strange and loud
- harsh, foreign-sounding
- more sulphurous
- usual unconscious
- less mild
- vigorous french
- almost thoughtful
- sundry violent
- highly audible
- short, foul
- favorite and familiar
- rather unprofessional
- such nautical
- forth sharp
- ingenious and picturesque
- altogether innocent
- hardest and sharpest
- occasional broad
- few illegal
- totally inappropriate
- strange western
- particularly vehement
- terrific german
- single, tremendous
- single, violent
- sharp, jerky
- dear and familiar
- absurd and useless
- single, harsh
- several emphatic
- long and heartfelt
- usual wild
- guttural german
- colorful new
- brief but pungent
- sharp authoritative
- particularly colorful
- much picturesque
- peculiarly offensive
- rather foul
- short but expressive
- four-letter
- few crisp
- interjectional
- coarse and violent
- other conversational
- certain violent
- such profane
- short and bitter
- short, furious
- queer foreign
- four-syllable
- rather unflattering
- highly specific
- peculiarly french
- nice, juicy
- few foolish
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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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