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 instructions
Below is a list of describing words for instructions. 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 instructions:
- further implicit
- entirely nonverbal
- multistage but entirely nonverbal
- well-mannered and agreeable
- hopefully additional
- confidential and explicit
- solid or graceful
- simplistic step-by-step
- primary and professional
- cool, imperious
- stringent and unequivocal
- intensive religious
- addled inadequate
- gratuitous religious
- complex normative
- manual and practical
- explicit or even implicit
- philosophical and monastical
- profane, clear
- excellent and laudable
- strict private
- wise and peremptory
- second, general
- gratuitous primary
- urgent behind-the-scenes
- precise step-by-step
- earlier terse
- general printed
- easy step-by-step
- extraordinary but quite explicit
- erratic and autocratic
- primary essential
- standard poetic
- additional cautionary
- cardinal further
- oral religious
- fatally explicit
- serious higher
- almost plain and apparent
- general oral
- quite clear and precise
- important, practical
- invaluable and significant
- technical or manual
- delightful and invaluable
- careless mechanical
- polish certain
- thorough individual
- basic hand-to-hand
- higher primary
- elementary collective
- sufficient religious
- nelly special
- diverse and punitive
- uniformly specific
- harsh and frequent
- exacting verbal
- overly harsh and frequent
- strict and specific
- would-be meticulous
- sally strict
- necessary catechetical
- explicit, lewd
- late circular
- specific and explicit
- indiscriminate gratuitous
- sufficiently implicit
- compulsory primary
- further especial
- regular and accurate
- often-repeated and explicit
- stony, philological
- owing recent
- gratuitous and sufficiently steady
- technical and positive
- high, speculative or practical
- typical mystical
- public or special
- allegedly mystic
- secondary, superior and special
- infamous and extraordinary
- superior and professional
- queer marginal
- primary, superior and professional
- electual
- theoretical and direct
- synodal and papal
- obligatory and secular
- generally telegraphic
- veritable superior
- municipal consular
- superior, secondary and primary
- useful step-by-step
- moral and mutual
- untimely technical
- fastest do-nothing
- frequently mild
- frequently mild but faithful
- sectarian or religious
- therein catechetical
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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