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 illness
Below is a list of describing words for illness. 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 illness:
- swift, mortal
- most emotional
- daunting and debilitating
- wrong, serious
- mysterious-but-fatal
- crippling and terminal
- long and most severe
- distinct calamitous
- sudden near-fatal
- psychosomatic, hypochrondiacal
- hypochrondiacal
- especially unrecognized
- long and incurable
- immediately feigned
- hacking and mental
- serious and probably chronic
- feigned long
- dangerous and probably fatal
- serious and tedious
- brief but fatal
- short but fatal
- accidental sudden
- previous viral
- severe but unconscious
- undisclosed but minor
- long and extremely painful
- acute but brief
- severe or even serious
- recent and alarming
- critical nervous
- short and painless
- brief but distressing
- long and very distressing
- imaginary or imperceptible
- petty, agreeable
- subsequent and last
- rare, fatal
- terrible debilitating
- sudden and serious
- usual rigorous
- severe and tedious
- long debilitating
- own near-fatal
- tedious terminal
- —lethal
- ofmental
- �lethal
- clumsily feigned
- chronic or long-term
- long and debilitating
- chronic psychosomatic
- severe systemic
- foul but not hopeless
- rare and usually fatal
- real or even psychosomatic
- serious psychosomatic
- debilitating and somewhat critical
- long or painful
- palpable, definable
- severe and almost fatal
- so-called sudden
- serious feverish
- serious and ultimately fatal
- present protracted
- totally useless and unnecessary
- severe or even moderate
- obscure or protracted
- short serious
- second long
- supper--fatal
- perhaps feigned
- long and most serious
- general, indefinable
- historic and really eventful
- painful and overwhelming
- sudden but not serious
- long and almost fatal
- troublesome and obstinate
- doubtful and tedious
- untimely feminine
- ominously brief and mysterious
- ominously brief
- long and very troublesome
- brief but very serious
- former remarkable
- severe but brief
- long and rather serious
- tedious and well-nigh fatal
- sharp and very painful
- dismal bad
- sudden and very alarming
- general and subsequent
- pardon--letters--final
- illness--fatal
- painful fatal
- long, incurable
- probably chronic
- afterwards feigned
- serious or scarcely recognizable
- incurable and painful
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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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