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 instrument
Below is a list of describing words for instrument. 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 instrument:
- philosophical and photographical
- little stringed
- stringed musical
- ancient stringed
- rude but weighty
- opaque composite
- prescient or long-range
- glorious, rich
- gigantic optical
- sweetest regular
- leipzig--notarial
- docile and most dangerous
- wretched but unflinching
- able and pliant
- other stringed
- stringed
- archaic musical
- good but comparatively small
- old stringed
- docile and passive
- rare stringed
- tempestuous and unquiet
- moderately responsive
- gross musical
- petrified musical
- delicate and versatile
- random musical
- inexpressibly important
- unidentifiable metallic
- extraordinary powerful
- rude musical
- unhappy and unconscious
- upright musical
- special and fatal
- flexible and ready
- unintentional mechanical
- great but expensive
- lifeless inactive
- querulous plaintive
- old and almost worthless
- musical stringed
- small stringed
- horrendously potent
- aurally delicious
- ingenious and sensitive
- mostly biochemical and oceanographic
- elegant and resourceful
- wooden musical
- ready and desperate
- old-fashioned, musical
- immense stringed
- unearthly optical
- hand-carved musical
- awkward and outlandish
- willing voluntary
- alphabetical dial
- meanest and most dependent
- willing and cordial
- splendid commonplace
- popular stringed
- fabulous musical
- queer, triangular
- brand-new, first-class
- beautiful stringed
- manageable, effective
- manageable, efficient
- javanese musical
- delicate and responsive
- heavy, unmanageable
- oldest meteorological
- public and secular
- harder or heavier
- mere and passive
- enigmatic musical
- illegally legal
- august and useful
- beautiful and extremely valuable
- heavy and sharp
- mere docile
- japanese musical
- curious stringed
- single stringed
- adept perfect
- first-rate tactical
- accurate and unimpeachable
- tiny stringed
- own, ruthless
- horrible and incongruous
- shiny, spotless
- relentless, unconquerable
- expensive musical
- antique surgical
- essential vocal
- chinese stringed
- peerless and potent
- animal, mineral or mythical
- mineral or mythical
- serviceable dramatic
- special, narrow-minded
- complete and mighty
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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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