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 instruments
Below is a list of describing words for instruments. 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 instruments:
- philosophical and photographical
- steadying certain
- little stringed
- relevant legal
- various stringed
- stringed musical
- rude musical
- other stringed
- actually large and cumbersome
- actually large
- several stringed
- ancient stringed
- diverse musical
- rude but weighty
- stringed
- nauseous musical
- rusty, spiked
- opaque composite
- sophisticated financial
- prescient or long-range
- other standardized
- glorious, rich
- fragile philosophical
- gigantic optical
- clumsy, outmoded
- sweetest regular
- reedy woodland
- leipzig--notarial
- certain stringed
- docile and most dangerous
- modern stringed
- wretched but unflinching
- rude but incisive
- able and pliant
- mathematical and nautical
- assorted primitive
- archaic musical
- rich and portable
- good but comparatively small
- favorite and most formidable
- old stringed
- astronomical, diabolical
- docile and passive
- wooden scientific
- rare stringed
- natural and most indispensable
- tempestuous and unquiet
- moderately responsive
- automatic musical
- gross musical
- straight and transverse
- petrified musical
- strange stringed
- delicate and versatile
- cheapest and most laborious
- random musical
- scientific and culinary
- inexpressibly important
- philosophical and electric
- unidentifiable metallic
- brazen and stringed
- extraordinary powerful
- delicious stringed
- former able
- 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
- attentive diagnostic
- horrendously potent
- valuable surgical
- aurally delicious
- antique musical
- ingenious and sensitive
- intelligent multipurpose
- mostly biochemical and oceanographic
- ancient surgical
- elegant and resourceful
- indonesian musical
- wooden musical
- similar formidable
- ready and desperate
- traditional handmade
- old-fashioned, musical
- hagal, musical
- immense stringed
- perfect boring
- unearthly optical
- musical and mathematical
- hand-carved musical
- different stringed
- awkward and outlandish
- absolution--musical
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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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