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 instincts
Below is a list of describing words for instincts. 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 instincts:
- deep, temperamental
- haphazard proprietary
- gregarious and slavish
- accurate animal
- ever-present social
- migratory and speculative
- natural & healthy
- wonderfully primitive
- mere reportorial
- higher humanitarian
- generalized everyday
- social or maternal
- blind and powerful
- malign and restless
- rarer dramatic
- primal canine
- strongly persistent
- ever present and persistent
- vital, inborn
- recognizable and reasonable
- savage and primal
- obscure, vestigial
- overdeveloped journalistic
- obscure but deep
- self-respecting and moral
- profound, self-respecting and moral
- ancient, human
- infallible provincial
- nordic predatory
- vague predatory
- primal, vigorous
- least maternal
- alive democratic
- sharp homing
- strong homing
- feeble flirtatious
- weak and very human
- sharp survival
- obscure, sadistic
- well-trained survival
- deep preternatural
- origin--natural
- subtler and scarcer
- old disciplinary
- dumb and powerful
- s--brutal and stupid
- old gregarious
- s--brutal
- brutal combative
- commonplace metaphysical
- delicate imperious
- rather first-rate
- blind democratic
- truly perverse
- violent or even homicidal
- maternal protective
- erratic and vagrant
- primordial survival
- human aggressive
- unsatisfied gregarious
- hormonal aggressive
- old feral
- fine journalistic
- delicate and just artistic
- combative or predatory
- unerring dramatic
- physiological, quasi-animal
- formal imitative
- good maternal
- sheer survival
- broader humanitarian
- natural acquisitive
- rudimentary maternal
- natural and murderous
- apparent homing
- baser human
- unbidden, ancient
- so-called baser
- unerring female
- liberal and monarchical
- purely contrarian
- seemingly dormant
- unerring masculine
- cowardly survival
- subconscious popular
- aesthetic and combative
- unfailing feminine
- hence grateful
- newborn but almost ferocious
- primeval selfish
- aggressive, bestial
- pardonable and natural
- infallible homing
- repulsive but most curious
- latent but mighty
- unchecked animal
- sappy, romantic
- unerring and powerful
- natural but ignoble
- tremulous moral
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
