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 inflections
Below is a list of describing words for inflections. 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 inflections:
- faintly nasal
- pronomial
- usual plural
- animate plural
- toneless alien
- awkward, atonal
- sharp melodious
- terminational or other
- distinct anteroexternal
- tolerantly protective
- inflection--special
- slight british
- usual imitative
- cynical, whimsical
- direct, circular and oblique
- decidedly adorable
- nasal, mid-atlantic
- stinging derogatory
- quaint, playful
- arrogant, nasal
- softer and still softer
- terse eastern
- youthful and spiritual
- curiously flat and weary
- anxious bitter
- faintest irrepressible
- exquisite, precise
- polite or deferential
- positive and abrupt
- unmistakably sardonic
- delicate tuneful
- slow climactic
- cumbersome teutonic
- sad, unconscious
- extravagant or unwarrantable
- peculiar, well-worn
- calmly hospitable
- contemptuous, rasping
- slightest inhospitable
- vibrant, eager
- different and incisive
- tiniest humorous
- slightest tonal
- thin insidious
- caustic downward
- delightful, kindest
- polite but ecclesiastical
- curt icy
- practised and yet natural
- especially labial
- shallow lingual
- slight lingual
- unemotional but perfect
- absolute emphatic
- endless and sweetest
- sharp, northern
- anteroexternal
- harsh or provocative
- seemingly insecure
- exact tonal
- persuasive foreign
- soft tonal
- asiatic, japanese
- delicate and melodious
- faint hungarian
- circular and oblique
- slightest improper
- bewilderingly different
- subtly disdainful
- queer comic
- decidedly sardonic
- coolly neutral
- flat and weary
- commonest grammatical
- alien, equatorial
- comic asian
- ominous, flat
- unrestrained sarcastic
- regular possessive
- slightly plaintive
- significant and sympathetic
- proper passionate
- old, whimsical
- curious downward
- rich pleasing
- almost jocose
- wonderful magnetical
- plaintive, sad
- characteristic marsupial
- small labial
- moderate and rather slow
- slow and moderate
- melodious and refined
- faint irish
- true plural
- few pronominal
- familiar, sardonic
- delicate and illusive
- gay, courageous
- mere angular
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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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