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 habitat

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

  • pristine or prehistoric
  • single non-military
  • pseudo-arboreal
  • less coastal
  • artificial but cozy
  • large-mammal
  • suitable orbital
  • natural aquatic
  • nearest complete
  • complete tropical
  • purportedly civilian
  • personal unnatural
  • natural watery
  • modular orbital
  • extremely rude and ignorant
  • northern natural
  • invariably inhospitable
  • total suitable
  • adjacent suitable
  • |real native
  • northern inshore
  • newly favorable
  • homogeneous grassy
  • continuous boreal
  • suitable boreal
  • almost optimum
  • rocky and decidedly tropical
  • inhospitable and inconvenient
  • mysterious technological
  • shabby one-room
  • immense distant
  • small and specialized
  • whole pseudo-arboreal
  • military-commercial
  • natural and native
  • maddeningly impersonal
  • primal, disquieting
  • avowed natural
  • grashal
  • innermost human
  • state-of-the-art technological
  • former mennonite
  • false but tangible
  • horizontal lunar
  • mammoth incomplete
  • earthly undersea
  • resultant artificial
  • oversized artificial
  • various self-contained
  • modular underwater
  • little family-run
  • natural final
  • seemingly desirable
  • extensive favorable
  • probably marginal
  • decidedly tropical
  • little mobile
  • dark unnatural
  • strange distant
  • thirty-foot tall
  • eminently favorable
  • occasional dusty
  • responsible and reliable
  • bigger, nicer
  • damn orbital
  • cheap, prefab
  • natural swampy
  • long livable
  • rocky upland
  • grandest physical
  • whole orbital
  • spare, utilitarian
  • nearly optimum
  • cool, rocky
  • sufficiently open
  • different vertebrate
  • particularly inaccessible
  • new tropical
  • cozy undersea
  • independent orbital
  • smaller man-made
  • big orbital
  • somewhat poorer
  • undisturbed natural
  • rather well-defined
  • little brushy
  • natural woodland
  • domed black
  • appropriate and harmonious
  • own self-contained
  • totally self-contained
  • muddy or sandy
  • good animal
  • nat\-ural
  • little intermediate
  • large and diverse
  • _aerial
  • new and advantageous
  • thoroughly unwholesome
  • natural, instinctive

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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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