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 habits
Below is a list of describing words for habits. 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 habits:
- nasty, smug
- disgusting personal
- generally unprofitable
- well-established new
- several rancid
- former turbulent
- strictly subterranean
- nasty artistic
- long-term parasitic
- unadorned and unflattering
- black, unadorned and unflattering
- slight, scholastic
- jocose and good-humored
- slightly jocose
- slightly jocose and good-humored
- inveterate professional
- semiparasitical
- worse fatal
- lazy pedestrian
- late but long
- true methodical
- woodland, fantastical
- often profligate
- europe--physical
- unnecessary and unhealthy
- old-fashioned irrational
- old bashful
- frugal personal
- long and ingrained
- boyish bad
- ingrained scientific
- endearing or irritating
- artless parental
- occasional and strange
- occasional and aberrant
- unsettling ordinary
- irregular, expensive
- mere affectional
- indolent and idle
- socially reprehensible
- annoying, selfish
- sheer ingrained
- correctly punctual
- nervous and victorious
- studiously neat
- usual and normal
- peculiar seasonal
- humblest, simplest
- abnormally sane and unimaginative
- imaginative emotional
- abnormally sane
- resolute and constant
- dreamy, self-conscious
- fastidious, critical
- reflective and temperate
- peculiar magisterial
- tolerably robust
- noisy and irregular
- easier continental
- suggestively secretive
- bestial and human
- unbreakable bad
- audacious mental
- sexual and dietary
- rational eighteenth-century
- chinese dietary
- inaccurate abundant
- aquatic and strictly terrestrial
- undisciplined and lawless
- diverse and active
- lucid and consecutive
- unnatural carnivorous
- particularly lucid and consecutive
- predatory and irregular
- selfish and intolerable
- frugal and temperate
- strange and almost primitive
- refined personal
- wild out-of-bounds
- naughty extravagant
- generally monogamous
- long-standing soviet
- nasty, antisocial
- lean tortuous
- interesting or eccentric
- bad, infantile
- chaste or studious
- dangerous or disgusting
- slovenly industrial
- mechanical professional
- sedulously careful
- laudable official
- virtuous dominical
- simple light-colored
- almost infamous
- irritating germanic
- old and unnecessary
- odd autobiographical
- somewhat hard-drinking
- steady and sedate
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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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