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 intellect
Below is a list of describing words for intellect. 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 intellect:
- pure and philosophic
- meanest and feeblest
- richly philosophical
- well-regulated human
- lofty and candid
- phenomenal and cunning
- massively restless
- fiery and far-reaching
- sharp but lazy
- enormous preternatural
- apparently crazed
- meditative and systematic
- acute and exalted
- coolest and strongest
- valuable and acute
- practical and naturally impatient
- blazingly brilliant
- impossibly discerning
- pure and impossibly discerning
- vigorous, logical
- rather unsound
- clear and subtle
- antique sovereign
- cold condemnatory
- clear and splendid
- rich and mobile
- penetrating, comprehensive
- human and satanic
- original or truly philosophic
- positive, alert
- kingly comprehensive
- powerful and bold
- best artistical
- opulent and even magnificent
- possible or material
- material or possible
- clear and analytic
- extraordinarily clear and analytic
- vast and steady
- frigid, luminous
- clear and masculine
- artiecial
- great, dormant
- dispassionate, alien
- masculine and towering
- incorruptibly truthful
- dispassionately judicial
- keen oriental
- vigorous and superior
- notably critical
- keenest and gravest
- untrained primitive
- ignorant and ill-prepared
- nimble and subtle
- always active and busy
- originally acute and powerful
- brilliant and modest
- ambitious and seductive
- masterful and cunning
- cautious elephantine
- penetrating and systematic
- daring and superior
- methodical and capacious
- clear, methodical and capacious
- keen and luminous
- venal and capacious
- enlightened and penetrating
- sparkling and bold
- refined, sparkling and bold
- innocent, human
- human, rational
- playful, busy
- moody and reflective
- fiery and rapid
- strong and cynical
- finite, terrestrial
- keen and graceful
- mediocre and even feeble
- native strong
- vigorous and fertile
- rational western
- different actual
- narrow and sluggish
- juvenile but overwhelming
- moody, stratospheric
- perfect, unemotional
- brilliant and electrifying
- bio\-\-\-logical
- unassuming but awesome
- complex, resourceful and potent
- resourceful and potent
- virtually invincible
- keen and highly skilled
- notoriously feeble
- frightful, promiscuous
- inexorable, merciless
- proudest unaided
- logical and dogmatic
- generally well-regulated
- incurably commonplace
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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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