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 expression
Below is a list of describing words for expression. 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 expression:
- eternal cheerful
- distinctly insulting
- seemingly irreverent
- utterly uncompromising
- sulky stubborn
- annoying, passive
- politely courteous
- halfway cheerful
- extremely quizzical
- faintest and simplest
- incomprehensible noisy
- anxious rapt
- peculiar, pathetic
- inscrutable and odd
- diplomatically apologetic
- briefly honest
- strangely voluptuous
- familiar unreadable
- serene, smug
- bland but implacable
- amazingly rational
- carefully contrite
- curiously avid
- suddenly implacable
- helpful intelligent
- unpleasantly sinister
- sweet and rather effeminate
- clearly sardonic
- vibrant and alert
- rapt, misty-eyed
- terribly fiendish
- disturbingly serene
- perpetually fierce
- queer, dangerous
- wary and disapproving
- unusually serious and compassionate
- brilliant and sometimes dazzling
- discouragingly wide-awake
- strangely frightful
- sanctimoniously sober
- particular smug
- bleakly cynical
- stiff, blank
- keen and innocently helpful
- completely impassive
- final and completely individual
- innocently helpful
- troublesome but necessary
- stupidly happy
- dusky, contorted
- acutely thoughtful
- grim but eager
- blandly respectful and attentive
- blandly respectful
- dazed, vacant
- foolish, dazed
- suitably dour
- less disdainful
- completely serene
- blank engrossed
- impassioned and heroic
- habitually passive
- innocent and unconcerned
- striking, fragrant
- intense and distant
- indefinable, faint
- massively perplexed
- disdainful, uncompromising
- wide-eyed, manic
- sublime proverbial
- vacant mute
- comically stubborn
- properly blank
- blandly smug
- welcome and totally unexpected
- peculiar bland
- geriatrically good-natured
- bemused and geriatrically good-natured
- exceedingly sensual
- satirical and resolute
- observant, sarcastic
- indulgent and protective
- troubled and absent
- phenomenally grotesque
- ominously neutral
- loving sexual
- pleasant vague
- solemn, distant
- strangely quizzical
- inquiring and attentive
- habitually sour
- innocent and slightly anxious
- attentive, childlike
- different pained
- blank stiff
- merest trifling
- hideously alien
- unnervingly perceptive
- disconcertingly serene and thoughtful
- disconcertingly serene
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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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