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 food
Below is a list of describing words for food. 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 food:
- plentiful free
- chemically nutritious
- always soft and tacky
- food--real
- foreign, soft
- unpalatable and insufficient
- frugal but nutritious
- little or too bad
- fresh, high-quality
- wretched and insufficient
- dangerous and unsubstantial
- ]oriental
- own computer-controlled
- excellent and highly nutritious
- cold and insufficient
- fresh and palatable
- abundant and better-prepared
- spare adequate
- real and tasty
- unwholesome and insufficient
- heavenly incorruptible
- wholesome and abundant
- tasty, nutritious
- chronically meager
- organic and especially animal
- nutritious but real
- palatable but hot
- improper and insufficient
- supply dainty
- lusty and masculine
- enough good and wholesome
- rich plentiful
- delectable aromatic
- good and juicy
- bland african
- wholesome and plentiful
- proper, healthful
- gaunt but good
- sure warm
- dehydrated and canned
- coarse and wretched
- indigestible and misguided
- insufficient and unwholesome
- lawful and acceptable
- gross and savory
- suitable bacterial
- insufficient, unwholesome
- just mexican
- simple and nutritious
- excellent exotic
- arid black-market
- ordinary and wholesome
- unclean or unnatural
- unaccustomed coarse
- indeed wretched and insufficient
- doctrinally permissible
- prime and proper
- bad and insufficient
- proper and allowable
- insufficient and bad
- wholesome and elegant
- unfailing and practically inexhaustible
- dry and indifferent
- insufficient and unhealthy
- digestible and nutritious
- miserable, insufficient
- supply sufficient and proper
- preferred sedentary
- improper or insufficient
- proper artificial
- scanty and unwholesome
- human commercial
- theoretically sufficient
- supposedly imperfect
- virtually ongoing
- preferred canned
- insufficiently fresh
- chief and most substantial
- indigenous but apparently deficient
- earliest and most intensive
- simple, northern
- unaccustomed spicy
- supply cheap and tasteless
- good, well-served
- special airborne
- inexpensive, good
- unadulterated and wholesome
- delicious real
- least, estimable
- solid, wholesome
- scanty, unwholesome
- aside animal
- themselves--intellectual
- sufficient wholesome
- enough nutritious
- material and cheap
- poor and insufficient
- portable ready-made
- wholesome, appetizing
- coarse but wholesome
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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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