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 fluctuations

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

  • relentlessly inevitable
  • complex magnetic
  • great and often unexpected
  • constant extraordinary
  • rarely rapid and great
  • rarely rapid
  • tensely nervous
  • irregularly multiannual
  • mild and entirely normal
  • slow but never-ending
  • unceasing and almost countless
  • much seasonal
  • frequent and unforeseen
  • wide perilous
  • grand, constant
  • probably slight
  • wide external
  • librational
  • painful and tumultuous
  • unpredictable and powerful
  • uneasy and even violent
  • perpetual and rhythmical
  • perpetual and uneasy
  • continual and amazing
  • strange continual
  • small and ever present
  • extraordinary monetary
  • seemingly periodic
  • rapid and entangled
  • usually wide and frequent
  • gallant, violent
  • small and considerable
  • wide latitudinal
  • frequent and ruinous
  • momentary and fitful
  • normal and not accidental
  • violent psychical
  • heavy seasonal
  • great and periodical
  • other wasteful
  • extremely periodic
  • gavitational
  • minor electronic
  • random tiny
  • almost diurnal
  • natural and unforeseen
  • rapid and sometimes violent
  • random quantum-mechanical
  • tremendous and permanent
  • strange and effortless
  • single glacial
  • seasonal and regional
  • deep or superficial
  • local and short-range
  • embryonic or individual
  • seasonal and critical
  • world-wide, convulsive
  • seasonal and cyclical
  • fierce and piteous
  • considerable relative
  • spontaneous and interesting
  • wide annual
  • wide seasonal
  • often wide
  • slight proportional
  • minor climatic
  • less periodic
  • fewer violent
  • increasingly breathtaking
  • comparatively slight and temporary
  • individual and partial
  • strange, uncaused
  • gradual and necessary
  • occasional and temporary
  • random thermal
  • quantum-gravitational
  • average seasonal
  • rapid and large
  • slight or great
  • excessive industrial
  • rapid, incomprehensible
  • sudden and wide
  • aside accidental
  • year-to-year
  • wild speculative
  • also irregular
  • multiannual
  • random and wild
  • frequent sharp
  • minor sensory
  • monthly hormonal
  • considerable seasonal
  • always random
  • drastic climatic
  • normal gaussian
  • regular tidal
  • annual seasonal
  • grave and frequent
  • slight rhythmic
  • usually 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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