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 investigation
Below is a list of describing words for investigation. 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 investigation:
- regional preternatural
- intensive theoretical
- open, out-and-out
- partial, silent
- entire telepathic
- difficult archeological
- temperate and well-informed
- cursory anatomical
- thorough and official
- obvious, clumsy
- orderly scientific
- new and richly rewarding
- systematic bacteriological
- cautious, efficient
- curious and inconclusive
- laborious and fruitless
- formal and thorough
- whatsoever scientific
- real archeological
- classic and timeless
- specific analytical
- singularly beneficial
- curious and inclusive
- interesting and anxious
- just step-by-step
- calm and circumspect
- already statistical
- curious thermometrical
- unfortunately further
- analytical mechanical
- eager, well-equipped
- independent mathematical
- careful further
- impartial and conscientious
- open and further
- doubtless closer
- painstaking, thorough
- wide, judicial
- thorough criminal
- important paranormal
- thorough or comprehensive
- first-hand and comprehensive
- blended private
- unreasonably thorough
- unpublicized private
- ever criminal
- socio-agricultural
- ordinarily profound
- certainly independent
- natal criminal
- penetrating and complete
- indeed strict
- keen clinical
- small and considerate
- grand compulsory
- rewarding laborious
- painstaking and complete
- subsequent analytic
- perfectly cold and philosophical
- difficult dialectical
- least, careful
- dianoiological
- thorough dianoiological
- special and honest
- further and most satisfactory
- again scientific
- strict and continual
- rather long and troublesome
- ongoing criminal
- impartial and critical
- profane and irreverent
- thoroughgoing and painstaking
- additional amateurish
- worth intensive
- ongoing federal
- subtle but exhaustive
- sufficiently mind-numbing
- stolid, unswerving
- relatively thorough
- full and merciless
- singularly consistent
- rapid and interested
- rather rapid and interested
- commendable and eventually successful
- exhaustive administrative
- proper and methodical
- complex and extremely delicate
- sadly shortlived
- meticulous and far-reaching
- properly complete
- proper, complete
- thorough clandestine
- phony hit-and-run
- special three-week
- on-the-spot technical
- ethical, scientific
- calm and thorough
- criminal and forensic
- easy and relatively straightforward
- extensive historico-critical
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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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