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 ingredients
Below is a list of describing words for ingredients. 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 ingredients:
- mysterious and possibly illegal
- necessary but tiresome
- purest and choicest
- tart, pungent
- far-fetched and heterogeneous
- inescapable and unforgettable
- main and incessant
- similarly sour
- main necessary
- revolting but harmless
- simple, key
- chief psychic
- essential and final
- rarer raw
- characteristic or principal
- highly corrosive and poisonous
- heart-rending and mysterious
- rare and unstable
- active or chief
- sharp and wayward
- principal or most active
- remarkably intoxicating
- principal or active
- basic and undeniable
- wretched, foul-smelling
- respective principal
- together dry
- basic active
- pungently arcane
- primary dietary
- key raw
- rarest social
- silent foreign
- last bland
- necessary teutonic
- essential, invariable
- specifically romantic
- principal nutritive
- elementary and important
- former essential
- psychic and altruistic
- necessary alkaline
- ornamental and figurative
- universal and pre-existent
- twice dry
- fatal wrong
- slowly dry
- mythical and certainly unknowable
- fiery and mellifluous
- certainly unknowable
- thereto chemical
- new irreducible
- purest and most healthful
- important and almost essential
- proportionably palatable
- special, offensive
- actually nutritive
- essential and harmonious
- certain non-metallic
- active and curative
- simply prosaic
- specially murderous
- homely miscellaneous
- sparse jewish
- principal detrimental
- indispensable national
- volatile manurial
- indefinite and obsolete
- _manurial
- sole preservative
- common manurial
- various manurial
- soluble, fertile
- frequently admirable
- potentially picturesque
- noxious and filthy
- disgusting and noxious
- important and much-discussed
- fat or sour
- harsh and astringent
- trivial and unedifying
- bad or low-priced
- abundant or most conspicuous
- different promiscuous
- various nutritious
- possibly illegal
- principal or characteristic
- extra chemical
- essential and general
- active and volatile
- manurial
- principal chemical
- several pernicious
- usual, common
- many powdered
- equally deleterious
- powdered and shredded
- primary psychoactive
- expensive or rare
- sour and powerful
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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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