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 ideas
Below is a list of describing words for ideas. 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 ideas:
- sudden, startling and revolutionary
- faintest bloody
- strange central
- origihal
- ok, nice
- mighty abstract
- common-sense, progressive
- gently fiendish
- good one-sided
- beastly vile
- strange, bold and ingenious
- him--moral
- romantic and very foolish
- hateful or disgusting
- dainty and poetical
- courageous and original
- large, logical
- quite courageous and original
- prevalent calamitous
- wildest and most hypothetical
- idealistic, sappy
- lofty, analytical
- cloudy abstract
- modern and altogether rational
- perfectly tangible and real
- outrageously material
- peculiarly un-christian
- famously erratic
- brilliantly heinous
- moral, philosophical and juridical
- stupid and repressive
- same mixed-up
- purely material and utilitarian
- naked original
- wonderful, salable
- insane democratic
- vulgar, inaccurate
- same ultra
- accurate precise
- damnably curious
- death-rehearsal
- exact or definite
- luminous and complete
- absurd, inconsistent
- sinister and cynical
- forthwith strange
- tumultuous and flattering
- seemingly fundamental
- least damned
- unpleasant and most unsuitable
- simple and possibly justifiable
- wacky but workable
- obviously unattractive
- europeanly delicate
- tremendously daring
- brand-new and wonderful
- resentful, angry
- splendid but visionary
- typically fiendish
- mystical and humanitarian
- entirely daft
- moronically simple
- colossal new
- preconceived contrary
- outrageous and unworkable
- nearly blasphemous
- primal and permanent
- crazy, preposterous
- counter-tactical
- sloppy, uniformed
- vague impracticable
- lovely gory
- astonishingly bold and grand
- elegant philosophical
- great or fruitful
- horrifically radical
- splendid or luminous
- simply weird
- uncontrollable and overwhelming
- undefined but significant
- vivid and general
- fewer literary
- accurate or precise
- mythological and metaphysical
- definite and terrific
- barbarous turkish
- dirty, puny
- various persecutory
- away gloomy
- generally distinct
- fleeting, charming
- wild and unforseen
- quite courageous
- former fearful
- shrewder and livelier
- absolute and lofty
- antiperistatical
- amazingly sensible
- favorite preconceived
- abstract general
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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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