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 humans
Below is a list of describing words for humans. 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 humans:
- tenacious corporeal
- amok elemental
- just shorter
- lousy, diseased
- dangerously frail and vulnerable
- stupid, indulgent
- stocky smaller
- clenched, other
- greedy, warlike
- terrifyingly brutal
- usual, few
- anatomically modern
- happy and competent
- brightest and most capable
- older or unhealthy
- totally unmodified
- well-informed, close-mouthed
- dangerously frail
- correspondingly free
- reliably sane
- mature and reliably sane
- again unscrupulous
- biologically modern
- genetically higher
- ever irreverent
- wretchedly scrawny
- helpless unfinished
- most frail
- unobtrusive but quietly powerful
- impatient biological
- downtrodden, hopeless
- capricious, untrustworthy
- nasty, savage
- many hairless
- short, grubby
- vastly outsized
- older captive
- fully protoplasmic
- erratic, untrustworthy
- nonessential and nonproductive
- bold, immortal
- esoteric standard
- grim, armored
- fanatically greedy
- passionately dramatic
- weak, short-lived
- identically uniformed
- nonmetafunctional
- theoretically ignorant
- capable but theoretically ignorant
- solitary old-style
- eagerly worshipful
- adaptable new
- however weird
- western, twenty-first-century
- wholly maniacal
- wild and wholly maniacal
- aggressive and territorial
- intelligent and compassionate
- otherwise barbaric
- younger and drunker
- mental-ically talented
- so-called old-style
- quirky, moody
- mentally receptive
- truly selfish and wicked
- shaggy, different
- foreign, deformed
- evil warlike
- few trigger-happy
- unwary or greedy
- normal weird
- ignorant and short-lived
- short-lived, shortsighted
- curious and potentially dangerous
- nasty, uncouth
- demonstrably demented
- faceless, uncaring
- apprehensive rogue
- mentally unpredictable
- strong but mentally unpredictable
- psionically capable
- skeletal, filthy
- regular, full-size
- ruh-real
- wary, hopeful
- pre-fetal
- mere tall
- clumsy and bumbling
- always unbalanced
- mostly unmodified
- formerly physical
- however revolting
- puny, fragile
- visually limited
- ordinary, unmodified
- scary, hairy
- worshipful virtual
- dangerous individual
- doubtful many
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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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