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 impressions
Below is a list of describing words for impressions. 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 impressions:
- vivid and broad
- cruel but accurate
- past and weaker
- marginally favorable
- fleeting, visual
- odd, empty
- clever insignificant
- constant, terrifying
- strongest and most permanent
- solid or serious
- inevitably deep
- bare final
- genuine visual
- horridly vivid
- extraordinary and almost fantastic
- casual but horridly vivid
- childish and ignorant
- fleeting, uncanny
- sweet or savage
- vague, unorganized
- certain psychal
- previously vague
- intolerable vast
- vivid unexpected
- liberal and durable
- keen and justifiable
- actual or ordinary
- torrid and complete
- peculiarly devotional
- rude and sensible
- original visionary
- riotous sensory
- vaguely unsatisfactory
- unconscious, marginal
- holistic, unconditional
- former indelible
- hungry physical
- vivid but very transient
- passable fair
- multitudinous vivid
- unfair and unfavorable
- motley, confusing
- indelible and irrational
- quick sensory
- odd vivid
- deep and unfavorable
- terrific and everlasting
- wrong arithmetical
- pleasant but sublime
- vivid and shocking
- vivid and single
- fleeting and fastidious
- vividly transient
- immediate and most brilliant
- definite overall
- elusive visual
- distinct and uneasy
- intangible, extra-sensory
- bizarre and momentary
- perpetually metamorphic
- former visual
- earlier fleeting
- direfully strong
- nervous or sentimental
- main, overwhelming
- muscular and visual
- vivid momentary
- full-page lithographic
- momentary unpleasant
- delicious, mysterious
- immediately favorable
- strong indelible
- vague, broad
- extraordinary abnormal
- gloomy and overwhelming
- sensuous and mental
- quite indelible
- imperfect sensual
- wonderful and indelible
- exalted and delightful
- village--general
- tumultuous, youthful
- momentary such
- fragmentary vivid
- deep and salutary
- perpetual and half-forgotten
- new troublesome
- instantaneous strong
- chaotic and amorphous
- vague composite
- indelibly weird
- best usual
- mere instantaneous
- great and very favorable
- reciprocal telepathic
- widespread but erroneous
- deep and unfortunate
- profound and indelible
- heterogeneous psychical
- delightful and majestic
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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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