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 interpretations
Below is a list of describing words for interpretations. 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 interpretations:
- _social and ethical
- horribly pessimistic
- higher, socialistic
- sure, recent
- sympathetic and transcendental
- polemic and literal
- traditional and mystical
- purely traditional and mystical
- instinctive, religious
- nearest western
- free thespian
- freest imaginable
- forth better and higher
- particularly poetical
- forth better
- particularly poetical and fantastic
- indeed specious
- authentic dramatic
- incomplete and frequently erroneous
- absolutely merciful
- textual and metrical
- liberal and not narrow
- simultaneous identical
- rather charitable
- sometimes perverse
- miserly possible
- ones--mystical
- colorfully imaginative
- re-read--rabbinical
- literal, biblical
- historical, functional
- partial sensory
- original materialistic
- elastic possible
- mystic, numerical
- good mythical
- ancient and widely current
- unwise judicial
- historical and mystical
- older allegorical
- timid and verbal
- intelligent and most significant
- religious, symbolical
- strict but unfortunate
- economic-sociological
- countless convoluted
- large statesmanlike
- interesting and perceptive
- annoying alternate
- popular, superficial
- strong, symbolic
- symbolic and liberal
- occasional, polite
- also wrong
- traditional possible
- mystical or tropical
- own transactional
- allegorical, mystical or tropical
- typical or allegorical
- recent extravagant
- allegorical or topical
- real and rigid
- extensive and strict
- theological and allegorical
- explicit and authoritative
- different and absolutely contradictory
- serious and authoritative
- absurd typical
- false and gross
- spiritually historical
- ultra literal
- artful and technical
- neat psychoanalytic
- similar astrological
- excessive mythological
- liturgical, symbolical
- new and strongly philosophical
- strongly philosophical
- ceremonial or sacerdotal
- german lieder
- twofold false
- falsely literal
- coarsely literal
- false literal
- doctrinaire and numerical
- picturesque but fanciful
- quantitative-mathematical
- absurd and gratuitous
- honest vocal
- literal and somewhat secular
- piously ingenious
- correct anthropological
- consequent literal
- grammatical and literal
- literal and critical
- equally compact and intelligent
- edifying and miraculous
- intimate verbal
- egotistical and personal
- private and subjective
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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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