Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 independence

Below is a list of describing words for independence. 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 independence:

  • full technoindustrial
  • estonian national
  • primitive and perpetual
  • intrepid, unyielding
  • usual asteroid
  • stubborn and fierce
  • fragile, necessary
  • cryptical and elusive
  • jealous and even hostile
  • indisputable financial
  • edifying personal
  • unconditional and unequivocal
  • latvian national
  • courteous but absolute
  • sturdy and turbulent
  • real patriarchal
  • proud and entire
  • easy, rural
  • outrageous and commendable
  • technoindustrial
  • irish legislative
  • unconditional, unilateral
  • anew sweet
  • extreme and sturdy
  • hard-won, long-held
  • high and almost peremptory
  • modest, toilsome
  • absolute and almost uncontrolled
  • uneasy legislative
  • provincial and corporate
  • fearless, sturdy
  • pole--national
  • incomplete, moral
  • sturdy but turbulent
  • mortal perfect
  • fearless and absolute
  • original and perpetual
  • personal and proprietary
  • absolute and unfettered
  • complete legislative
  • irish cultural
  • complete technological
  • private, administrative and financial
  • commonplace, technical
  • chartered ancient
  • least communal
  • initial proprietary
  • noble and superb
  • utter and irresponsible
  • neutral, godlike
  • debated--national
  • hard-earned personal
  • hardy individual
  • former manorial
  • standard, genuine
  • undoubtedly economic
  • quiet proud
  • political nor literary
  • original honorary
  • prosperity--moral
  • prosperous--national prosperity--moral
  • precarious and tumultuous
  • technically complete
  • sturdy dependent
  • stern and hard-won
  • apparent legislative
  • obsolete, old-fashioned
  • cantonal and communal
  • substantial legislative
  • insolent, individual
  • just canadian
  • fiscal or even political
  • tumultuous municipal
  • therewith economic
  • seemingly affluent
  • stubborn restless
  • sturdy and commendable
  • real, frank
  • worth, more
  • surprising functional
  • wayward and beautiful
  • unrestricted national
  • equally lawless and undisciplined
  • sovereign philippine
  • moral, national
  • merely habitual and unconscious
  • old-time haughty
  • intact spiritual
  • ill-defined, anarchic
  • masculine, noble
  • short-lived republican
  • transvaal absolute
  • reciprocal causal
  • previous masculine
  • withered mental
  • interim belgian
  • old and turbulent
  • lifelong economic
  • ideal, absolute
  • absolute fiscal

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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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