Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 fame

Below is a list of describing words for fame. 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 fame:

  • old and prodigious
  • dazzling, towering
  • ancient and prophetic
  • clear compacted
  • slight immortal
  • contemporary or posthumous
  • glory--personal
  • important, eternal
  • worth and spotless
  • longest posthumous
  • brief worldwide
  • real, resounding
  • greater posthumous
  • sudden vicarious
  • deserving solid
  • memorial and eternal
  • deceitful, posthumous
  • certainly posthumous
  • durable and ever-growing
  • everlasting literary
  • present nor posthumous
  • sufficient european
  • letter--immortal
  • high and endless
  • faithful, universal
  • fly immortal
  • wide and very sudden
  • else intellectual
  • fair untarnished
  • national or world-wide
  • unimpeachable fair
  • doughty dismal
  • thy lineal
  • spurious, ephemeral
  • more unenvied
  • speedy mundane
  • perishable and short-lived
  • distant and solid
  • know--especially posthumous
  • innocent and enviable
  • deservedly superior
  • undoubtedly remunerative
  • singular oratorical
  • merry and disreputable
  • sinister, worldwide
  • hitherto local
  • classic and world-wide
  • fresh ill-gotten
  • undying decorative
  • pure or spotless
  • unique and undying
  • otherwise world-wide
  • considerable horticultural
  • concurrent public
  • star-immortal
  • thy star-immortal
  • holy spotless
  • harsh but common
  • other, capricious
  • wide and worthy
  • exalted and durable
  • mysterious and contingent
  • worth and fair
  • rapid posthumous
  • warlike and civic
  • later managerial
  • solid and universal
  • wan least
  • otherwise fair and honorable
  • literary nor scientific
  • similar and enviable
  • goodly german
  • due ill
  • sinister but historic
  • insectial
  • long and thy
  • national and transatlantic
  • judicial and revolutionary
  • forensic or literary
  • low precarious
  • ever fair and honest
  • less posthumous
  • sad but eternal
  • poetic-pictorial
  • original sensational
  • guilty martial
  • artificial and accidental
  • now imperishable
  • worthy immortal
  • hard-earned and well-deserved
  • immortal and resplendent
  • generous, spotless
  • common and unadulterated
  • daytime deathless
  • thereby immortal
  • worth and national
  • solid and independent
  • soon hasty
  • thy widespread
  • immediate and world-wide

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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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