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 facts
Below is a list of describing words for facts. 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 facts:
- unknown historical
- indisputable and unimportant
- absolute, peremptory
- analogous and striking
- unprecedentedly stern
- naked, frigid
- seriously interesting
- hard geological
- often unmistakable
- coincidental and meaningless
- palpable and often unmistakable
- mere categorical
- central and unavoidable
- basic, implicit
- undeniably disturbing
- strange but reliable
- simplest observable
- embarrassingly well-known
- odd, miscellaneous
- strange but demonstrable
- appalling and undeniable
- ugly central
- ideal ignoble
- sad but inescapable
- honest and bare
- meagerly suggestive
- genuinely magical
- main chief
- quite simple and definite
- significant and gratifying
- plain and leafy
- stubborn historical
- obvious unbelievable
- undeniable, naked
- small, incomprehensible
- further salient
- individual astronomical
- ultimate and irresolvable
- stubborn and triumphant
- singular or interesting
- humiliating but true
- undeniable social
- fresh and disconcerting
- multitudinous and long-established
- relevant, dangerous
- blindly obvious
- mere disastrous
- well-known and undisputed
- unequivocal anatomical
- new and intensely disagreeable
- hard historical
- last and most astounding
- small but unanimous
- unfair but inescapable
- bare, meager
- unavoidable, heavy
- forward indisputable
- singularly fresh and fascinating
- wonderful and well-established
- poorest historical
- depressing and undeniable
- hard, natural
- dull and ineffectual
- graphic and extraordinary
- obscure basic
- clumsy and offensive
- terse, bare-bones
- literal and solemn
- conclusive and evident
- terrible obvious
- material historical
- odd and injurious
- notorious, unquestionable
- cold and horrifying
- puzzling and distressing
- undisciplined and aggressive
- great significant
- palpable and stubborn
- above-mentioned physical
- wholly unquestionable
- erroneous, economic
- salient, awful
- immediate delightful
- abstract and transient
- notorious and undisputed
- rather commonplace and comic
- sad but unavoidable
- unquestioned and tragic
- private and latent
- unheard-of, fabulous
- damn unfunny
- unavailable but highly relevant
- huge and hilarious
- many physico-geographical
- troublesome and quite unforeseen
- mental, intellectual
- amusing but distressing
- personal, nonessential
- simple and rather obvious
- merely pathetic
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
