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 goodness
Below is a list of describing words for goodness. 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 goodness:
- greater, ecstatic
- gentle perplexed
- stupid infantile
- temperate but fervent
- thorough, unsuspecting
- native thorough
- sheer, undeniable
- inherent and remarkable
- pedestrian and ineffectual
- illustrious personal
- thy inadvertent
- real or formal
- militant and victorious
- better, latent
- wholesome savory
- commonplace and universal
- grimly commonplace and universal
- grimly commonplace
- rough gracious
- formal, intrinsic
- intrinsic, formal
- wonderful and continual
- relative and conditional
- qualitative or gradual
- modal, qualitative or gradual
- modal, moral
- intrinsic and not relative
- free communicative
- absolutely unnatural
- impulsive and intuitive
- gritty essential
- affable, cheerful
- delightful, lovable
- innate, old-fashioned
- pure, political
- secret and infinite
- worst, invisible
- pure and uncommon
- dear entire
- sovereign high
- sure, bread-and-butter
- usually negative and inert
- simple courageous
- stable, comprehensive
- belated and extraordinary
- hitherto paternal
- exalted and ardent
- incomprehensible and unimaginable
- tolerably naughty
- thy plentiful
- infinite, unbounded
- simple intrinsic
- thorough and transparent
- quite wonderful and charming
- amiable amicable
- sincere unaffected
- precious and inconceivable
- tragic and futile
- infinite and ineffable
- infinite perfect
- much unassuming
- intrinsic and unqualified
- thine inexpressible
- goodness--transcendental or ontological
- goodness--transcendental
- luminous, such
- fatherly divine
- inane and impossible
- bad and positive
- late condescending
- real unassuming
- steady unfailing
- utter sane
- negative, inactive
- adorable, angelic
- young, spontaneous
- poor exterior
- abstract and essential
- transparent simple
- vague universal
- unalterable and infinite
- definite abstract
- infinite and exquisite
- pure, paternal and divine
- almost angelical
- essential and disinterested
- thy communicative
- universal, impartial
- unselfish and exalted
- standard real
- immense unbounded
- sternly self-conscious
- perfect innate
- essential solid
- gentle and cordial
- highest and eternal
- seemingly innate
- thy transcendant
- rare and unparalleled
- simple unobtrusive
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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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