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 invention
Below is a list of describing words for invention. 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 invention:
- fancy, witty
- sufficiently comical
- latest and most incredible
- misty gothic
- percival newest
- prolific and rich
- useful and shrewd
- quick and fruitful
- immeasurably fine
- direct, literal
- notably pregnant
- cold and merely decorative
- fresh, absurd
- amazing and extraordinary
- absurd and romantic
- ingenious and superior
- brilliant and probable
- useful and cunning
- dogmatic and poetical
- double new
- newfangled and heathenish
- clear elizabethan
- meanest and most diabolical
- slightly puckish
- ready, quick
- modern but almost indispensable
- last and most admirable
- new demoniacal
- own unproductive
- unfortunate metaphysical
- vigorous and copious
- grossly modern
- sporadic and multiple
- original, sporadic and multiple
- jewish or babylonian
- feeble mythological
- crucial independent
- successive architectural
- miraculous and really insane
- transparent and unskilled
- new and undisclosed
- sublime or romantic
- spurious, heretical
- symbolical and allowable
- individual or artistic
- daring and scientific
- mighty and practical
- damaging little
- pure powerless
- dangerous, mad
- ofcosmetisurgical
- humorous and pleasant
- latest fiendish
- sweet flat
- chaotic mechanical
- somewhat lewd
- grotesque fraudulent
- late and wretched
- spontaneous poetical
- necessarily slow and dependent
- extravagant or profuse
- mal, pure
- new and most revolutionary
- beneficient modern
- useful or distinctive
- incomparable and new
- essentially incomparable and new
- essentially incomparable
- absolutely original and unique
- bold or life-like
- new and sufficiently ludicrous
- promising comic
- simple but valuable
- late and very poor
- generally meritorious
- effective and generally meritorious
- comprehensive and effectual
- ever fresh and fertile
- rich incidental
- namely linguistic
- antique and almost obsolete
- ever felicitous
- obvious and laborious
- profligate modern
- fancy and whimsical
- equally inhuman and irrational
- inhuman and irrational
- secret and marvelous
- epoch-making nautical
- refined poetical
- inimitably happy
- quite free and rapid
- truly fanciful and difficult
- mere unnatural
- instinctive, semi-conscious
- masses--social or political
- masses--social
- difficult and ingenious
- grander, ironic
- fancy and fertile
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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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