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 input
Below is a list of describing words for input. 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 input:
- immense thermal
- enormous, continual
- local, official
- direct instrumental
- continuous sensory
- proper sensory
- blank audio
- direct mnemonic
- coherent electrical
- maximum sensory
- carefully impartial
- proper factual
- believable visual
- intense psychical
- much, sensory
- nonessential neural
- minimal real
- slightest human
- genuine sensory
- constant sensory
- sudden sensory
- vague sensory
- sophisticated sensory
- more unsolicited
- sensory and other
- greatest sensory
- cards-special
- obviously manual
- raw sensory
- humiliatingly simple
- externally accessible
- earlier operational
- optional manual
- more caloric
- negative sensory
- imprecise sensory
- slow digital
- huge and constant
- concrete sensory
- much sensory
- �numerical
- conventional sensory
- rapidly depressed
- organic subjective
- minimal positive
- biggest editorial
- irrelevant sensory
- still sensory
- correct metabolic
- unknown audio
- remote neural
- incorporating previous
- up-to-date, meaningful
- enlightened and discerning
- intermittent or even continuous
- qualitative external
- tangled sensory
- creative or technical
- tial linguistic
- vast sensory
- audio, direct
- sensory and analytic
- daily sensory
- inconsequential sensory
- direct neural
- limited sensory
- enough sensory
- further electrical
- additional sensory
- keen sensory
- normal sensory
- sensory
- reliable visual
- overwhelming sensory
- standby alert
- familiar and adequate
- human sensory
- independent sensory
- sophisticated subliminal
- strange sonic
- cost-effective audio
- usual sensory
- less sensory
- perceptive editorial
- unpleasant sensory
- other aural
- usually standard
- other sensory
- full sensory
- full, direct
- substantially less
- simple visible
- full audio
- automatic navigational
- actual sensory
- more thermal
- extreme sensory
- ]pathological
- direct sensory
- complete sensory
Popular Searches
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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