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 goods
Below is a list of describing words for goods. 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 goods:
- wholesale dry
- retail dry
- basic petrochemical
- commodities--capital
- industrial and electrical
- intermediate and capital
- fancy optical
- back portuguese
- back european
- active capital
- most capital
- social primary
- faulty or substandard
- passive capital
- ordinarily portable
- young dry
- present consumptive
- corporal or human
- effectual and substantial
- new automotive
- further rancid
- finest baked
- special or dangerous
- mass-produced, low-cost
- primarily capital
- especially perishable
- warenregal
- native and partly foreign
- dry and fancy
- refractory ceramic
- local dry
- suddenly shoddy
- flavored baked
- explosive and other
- intricate and near-magical
- extremely precise and accurate
- presumably illicit
- semi-finished
- full, canned
- largest dry
- eminent dry
- ancient and lumbering
- fancy dry
- inconsistent greater
- fashionable dry
- artificial capital
- capital and capital
- serviceable capital
- immediately enjoyable
- basic, standardized
- ready-made, second-hand
- irresistible dry
- exotic and desirable
- canned and bottled
- few canned
- rarest newest
- relatively shoddy
- usually simpler and cheaper
- usually simpler
- fanciful dry
- primarily rough
- reliable dry
- typewritten green
- tropical and neutral
- eastern german-made
- many woolen
- free and inexhaustible
- individual exchangeable
- necessary consumptive
- luxurious consumptive
- perishable non-material
- entirely consumptive
- prosperous and many
- german cheap
- still external
- external corporal
- spiritual and greater
- electrical domestic
- fugitive and difficult
- specific contraband
- other legational
- appropriate neutral
- contraband and innocent
- serviceable silken
- trifling fancy
- pharmaceutical and biological
- chemical, pharmaceutical and biological
- specific agricultural
- perishable agricultural
- shuttered dry
- meager material
- ordinary canned
- merely marketable
- assorted canned
- down baked
- canned and dry
- often shoddy
- significant hot
- repellent, canned
- fancy baked
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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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