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 firm

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

  • wealthy and most respectable
  • generally abiding
  • successful investment-counseling
  • investment-counseling
  • small semiprofessional
  • economic ambassadorial
  • sizeable industrial
  • bond-rating
  • important bond-rating
  • commercial biotech
  • silken standard
  • fifth-largest silk-stocking
  • big, slick
  • larger less
  • long-established and highly respectable
  • commercial moneymaking
  • late legal
  • local high-tech
  • poor bankrupt
  • general import-export
  • own import-export
  • private waste-disposal
  • duly chartered
  • small genetic-engineering
  • office-supply rental
  • prestigious financial
  • prudent nor more
  • great, high-grade
  • extensive and enterprising
  • long-established and wealthy
  • excellent and creditable
  • competent and honorable
  • wrinkled and more
  • palpable and more
  • particular peruvian
  • chief and most enterprising
  • vindictive rival
  • loyal, old-fashioned
  • gradual, delicate
  • second-hand italian
  • progressive and daring
  • soft and less
  • equally eminent and unscrupulous
  • eminent and unscrupulous
  • powerful montreal
  • devout and only less
  • solid and conservative
  • now enterprising
  • furrowed, less
  • western pharmaceutical
  • long-established and respectable
  • well-known cartographical
  • unwashed and discomfited
  • circumspect and more
  • proportionably more
  • proportionably more or less
  • highly antiquated
  • wealthy baltic
  • small but prestigious
  • sudden and unconscious
  • new and insignificant
  • little biotech
  • an
    electrical
  • number-one corporate
  • small biotech
  • superficially innocuous
  • long-established legal
  • gruesome goal
  • small, marginal
  • famous mail-order
  • prestigious and wealthiest
  • little mail-order
  • bogus legal
  • biggest architectural
  • successful venture-capital
  • large import-export
  • reliable and highly respectable
  • cincinnati-based
  • auctioneer-appraisal
  • large auctioneer-appraisal
  • venezuelan financial
  • prestigious but low-profile
  • trustworthy, less
  • third-rate big-money
  • fairly moribund
  • reasonable but real
  • already trodden
  • elastic and more
  • supple or more
  • wise, more
  • afterwards well-known
  • large dental
  • german electrical
  • fastidiously careful
  • childish, more
  • peculiar, gentle
  • somewhat thinner and less
  • theatrical managerial
  • fleshy, more or less
  • handsome, more

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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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