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 inquiry
Below is a list of describing words for inquiry. 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 inquiry:
- painstaking and fairly competent
- exhaustive formal
- frank and pitiless
- deeper, rasping
- theotechnological
- critical empirical
- candid but rational
- luridly sulphurous
- ~cial
- long and scrupulous
- free and almost indifferent
- theoretical or factual
- terse, impatient
- dreadfully austere
- immediate and intensive
- wholly speculative
- federal, judicial or legislative
- further laudable
- straightforward step-by-step
- exact and unimpassioned
- particular reflective
- vaguely timid
- intense, poignant
- perhaps presumptuous
- previous magisterial
- useful judicial
- expensive judicial
- last, vital
- admirably laborious
- slightest procedural
- unceasingly active
- courageous further
- preliminary and entirely fruitless
- intellectual and intelligent
- prying such
- second modest
- historical mythological
- idle and insignificant
- directly experimental
- previous systematic
- undoubtedly free
- anxious and decisive
- irish lunatic
- conscientious and public-spirited
- generally fruitless and pernicious
- generally fruitless
- exhaustive, definite
- freest critical
- interesting historico-critical
- crypto-psychical
- diligent and respectful
- welcome psychological
- impartial, diligent
- almost distressed
- diligent and impartial
- immediate special
- subtle and careful
- persistent and dangerous
- confidential and highly skilled
- discreet local
- dryly statistical
- ruthless and thorough
- past or modern
- rational and mathematical
- lawful and gentle
- suspicious and stern
- curious and severe
- memorable magisterial
- drastic post-mortem
- baffling, unspoken
- quietly appealing
- interesting and cognate
- polite and business-like
- painful, revolting
- casual, tactful
- avail--personal
- curious or impertinent
- methodical, thorough
- abrupt, swift
- disinterested rational
- petulant, silent
- new rigorous
- absurd but felicitous
- racial and hereditary
- vexatious and captious
- competent or independent
- diligent and full
- astonishingly personal
- open and decisive
- laudable scientific
- careful and apparently incidental
- further and natural
- systematic and disinterested
- courteous but eager
- opposition--naval
- further timid
- unreasonable, judicial
- boldest private
- greatly scientific
- impartial parliamentary
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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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