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 information
Below is a list of describing words for information. 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 information:
- award-winning
- miscellaneous geographic
- miscellaneous demographic
- largest computerized
- substantial and credible
- digital accessible
- much cellular
- total, such
- little substantiated
- private, official
- reliable, up-to-date
- valuable hacking
- confidential or proprietary
- back tangential
- vulnerable, proprietary
- much useful
- much valuable
- potential, useful
- readily retrievable
- inaccurate or insufficient
- much exact
- further reliable
- supply practical
- descriptive or statistical
- often authentic
- best and often authentic
- complete and unambiguous
- back useful
- often second-hand
- considerable fascinating
- important bio-geographical
- trivial and pertinent
- soon exact
- incoming spanish
- inadequate genetic
- much-needed commercial
- historical, technical or artistic
- last, official
- recent unofficial
- fresh and certain
- copious and precise
- national technical
- useless incidental
- thoroughly unconnected
- perfect and up-to-date
- amusing or potentially significant
- pertinent defensive
- unusual or illicit
- useful and erroneous
- ordinarily unavailable
- recent quantitative
- special and reliable
- back reliable
- rare and often amusing
- trading--geographical
- sinister and wrong
- worldwide, bilingual
- available relevant
- much interesting
- miscellaneous military
- inaccurate and incomplete
- general, practical
- precise and authentic
- much curious
- chaotic but relatively harmless
- supply fire-control
- aural signal
- unintelligible scientific
- liberal, humanistic
- spurious, secondhand
- obscure and privileged
- increasingly unbelievable
- always extensive and accurate
- always extensive
- unnecessary and misleading
- amusing or useful
- probably negative
- general and sketchy
- usefully assimilable
- statisti-cal
- precise but minimal
- authentic explicit
- much bibliographical
- so-called trustworthy
- useful and otherwise unattainable
- new reliable
- private positive
- superior private
- back vital
- much reliable
- enough specialized
- necessary topographical
- factual and logical
- precise but limited
- enough scurrilous
- complete or totally accurate
- genetic and scientific
- reliable first-hand
- vague, limited
- deliberately erroneous
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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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