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 gain

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

  • immediate and immoderate
  • supplementary clean
  • unnatural sordid
  • thy dishonest
  • sordid and prodigious
  • doubtful present
  • slight probable
  • slight egotistic
  • small and dishonest
  • prudent interior
  • neurotic psychological
  • net democratic
  • scarce honest
  • greater clear
  • significant net
  • vile material
  • ample net
  • sectarian or national
  • immediate and inordinate
  • net productive
  • ancestral routine
  • pecuniary personal
  • probable but questionable
  • cosmetic or functional
  • geopolitical and commercial
  • personal material
  • rapid and notable
  • single territorial
  • much clear
  • personal or institutional
  • exceedingly wicked and stupid
  • small but positive
  • vast and clear
  • farther positive
  • small and equivocal
  • relative democratic
  • total and astonishing
  • flood-plains--social and political
  • flood-plains--social
  • low or sordid
  • profitable honest
  • rapid but quite wholesome
  • prospective monetary
  • manifestly private
  • prospective cultural
  • obtainable net
  • harder spiritual
  • commercial or substantial
  • temporary and quite subordinate
  • immediate or individual
  • slight evolutionary
  • apparent steady
  • individual, national
  • ~--normal
  • prospective adventitious
  • direct and very large
  • always illusive
  • hoped-for enormous
  • economic and selfish
  • justifiable and expedient
  • small and immediate
  • independent poor
  • temperamental or other
  • socially best
  • material and monetary
  • larger additional
  • inferior and incidental
  • substantial theoretical
  • net sensuous
  • clear unexpected
  • measurable dynamic
  • sheer pecuniary
  • less ill-gotten
  • appreciable and calculable
  • own adventitious
  • mere strategic
  • net pecuniary
  • enough vertical
  • firmenkapital capital
  • main audio
  • enormous and immediate
  • unprofitable, little
  • \}personal
  • occasionally political
  • clear material
  • greater selfish
  • crass personal
  • sordid, cynical
  • purely forpersonal
  • sometimes illusory
  • puerile personal
  • significant and immediate
  • substantial therapeutic
  • individual reproductive
  • double mutual
  • immense liberal
  • non-taxable, ill-gotten
  • illustrative material
  • illegal and exorbitant
  • small transitory

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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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