Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 intelligence

Below is a list of describing words for intelligence. 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 intelligence:

  • clever, above-average
  • weekly consolidated
  • comprehensive basic
  • strategic basic
  • basic and current
  • journal artificial
  • calm, evenhanded
  • vivid and preternatural
  • fascinating, treacherous
  • fine and quick
  • inferior collective
  • quick and gay
  • continuous basic
  • interdepartmental basic
  • wicked, diabolical
  • chatty small-town
  • arcane artificial
  • truthful mild
  • horrendous evil
  • vast and different
  • enigmatic electronic
  • unexpected and most opportune
  • closest but most secret
  • keen and encyclopaedical
  • supple, lofty
  • primary artificial
  • astonishing and felicitous
  • special, high
  • powerful and unfettered
  • back trustworthy
  • young much
  • immense cosmopolitan
  • latest and only reliable
  • true artificial
  • central central
  • sharp but limited
  • keen, loyal
  • human or superior
  • also midlevel
  • joyful and wonderful
  • terrifying, incomprehensible
  • terrible, pitiful
  • individualistic and independent
  • resolute, insolent
  • swift evil
  • normal or superior
  • somehow limited
  • profound and balanced
  • intense but futile
  • precise and broad
  • tremulous, nascent
  • greater available
  • rogue artificial
  • indisputably high
  • overnight, human
  • ferocious, infinite
  • perhaps crafty
  • observant insightful
  • vindictive and enraged
  • dubious or incomplete
  • vast, native
  • grave and keen
  • back phoney
  • truly tripedal
  • well-nigh preternatural
  • much rudimentary
  • limited and outdated
  • moderate or higher
  • priceless naval
  • afraid naval
  • malign and bestial
  • active inquiring
  • terrestrial and arithmetical
  • quick and flexible
  • pleasing but most inconsequential
  • keen and sardonic
  • splendid and sovereign
  • worth and superior
  • clear-headed and undisturbed
  • broad and penetrating
  • unexpected and distressing
  • average analytical
  • capacious, fiery
  • small but wakeful
  • fresh responsive
  • merciless inhuman
  • broad and virile
  • admirably dispassionate
  • inscrutable and sardonic
  • bright but restive
  • benevolent higher
  • autonomous artificial
  • alarming and unexpected
  • keen, supple
  • temporary or even illusory
  • extraordinary robotic
  • enormous but evil
  • scientific, technical and medical
  • many mal
  • moderately aware

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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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