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 failure
Below is a list of describing words for failure. 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 failure:
- resounding technical
- persistent and monotonous
- absolute and disgraceful
- thorough and disgraceful
- single grateful
- utter and miserable
- abject and horrifying
- gradual dismal
- general, blank
- spectacular and brilliant
- bad, disgraceful
- final, catastrophic
- bilateral cardiac
- gross and dreadful
- awkward and utter
- unconfirmed mechanical
- fatal mechanical
- serious metabolic
- utter and dismal
- dismal genetic
- certain, total
- logistic and economic
- total professional
- subsequent ignominious
- complete and ignominious
- legendary tragic
- usually drastic
- wooden cones--partial
- cones--partial
- cruel, ludicrous
- gross and culpable
- catastrophic structural
- major coronary
- recent bruising
- dem-onstrably fatal
- notorious navigational
- drunken, ineffectual
- tragic structural
- critical experimental
- complex and catastrophic
- miserable and immediate
- dismal and signal
- perpetual and inglorious
- planters--economical
- remarkable and fortunate
- inevitable flat
- trial and glorious
- grotesque or tragic
- tragic and dismal
- complete and foolish
- sad and most humiliating
- dismal and ludicrous
- apparently hopeless and final
- miserable and ludicrous
- systemic institutional
- almost consistent
- complete and disastrous
- such pituitary
- pervasive, incipient
- partial hydraulic
- rascal big
- lactational
- especially expensive
- collective synergistic
- consistent and ultimately damaging
- simple scholastic
- utter out-and-out
- likely complete
- simultaneous catastrophic
- colossal and agonizing
- egregious moral
- hopeless and brutal
- flat artistic
- complete and unhappy
- certain and disastrous
- utter and undeniable
- piteous, dreary
- dire and complete
- abject and intolerable
- unredeemed and hopeless
- grave and irritating
- catastrophic and public
- abject tragic
- splendid and priceless
- acute circulatory
- slightest probable
- conspicuous and flaming
- consummate and glaring
- dire, undiluted
- perpetual, passionate
- far high
- final and palpable
- otherwise relative
- individual or otherwise relative
- signal disastrous
- general colossal
- same--total
- inglorious and utter
- miserable and possibly disastrous
- dismal and complete
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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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