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 irony
Below is a list of describing words for irony. 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 irony:
- further and exquisite
- ultimate meaningless
- profound and very genuine
- grim, pervasive
- unconscious and sublime
- wry and sad
- calm and almost incredible
- tense, hopeful
- tacit and even unconscious
- unmistakable and discourteous
- haughty and emphatic
- sedate practical
- strange, slight
- least cosmic
- full and poignant
- sombre and venomous
- bitter, weird
- deep but unintended
- double inescapable
- deadpan teutonic
- ultimate, crowning
- caustic and bitter
- rough, bloodless
- surely subtle
- horrible and hysterical
- happy and judicious
- bitter and blasphemous
- more atheist
- incredible, maddening
- perfect stupid
- implacable and sovereign
- grimly delightful
- exquisitely servile
- faint benevolent
- mild, reminiscent
- terrible, unconscious
- terrible unconscious
- delicate, good-natured
- faint but somewhat resentful
- naive, peculiar
- exquisite imperturbable
- habitual luxurious
- grisly dramatic
- grim dramatic
- enough polite
- final grave
- brutal and ultimately self-defeating
- perversely splendid
- particular mild
- enough wry
- customary benevolent
- first-rate compassionate
- courageous and witty
- poignant and sarcastic
- quiet playful
- mischievous and genial
- icy and often cruel
- high, benevolent
- painful, husky
- condensed french
- keenest and bitterest
- painful and almost hideous
- gentle but piquant
- characteristic genial
- blended bitter
- fierce, exquisite
- much-discussed romantic
- peculiarly comic
- grave and caustic
- pernicious and morbid
- topsy-turvical
- same topsy-turvical
- wrong and short-lived
- grim and appropriate
- grave and not discourteous
- meek and venomous
- bitter and keen
- apt and good-natured
- secret, small
- savage, disdainful
- blank, childish
- pitiless and continual
- pedantic and unconscious
- vulgar, hard
- bitter and fateful
- fine and poignant
- consistent and unswerving
- high but easy
- austere and accurate
- perfectly galling
- delicate and ever-present
- bitter and despairing
- mild but final
- weird, irresponsible
- grave and tolerant
- exquisite grave
- bitter and pitiless
- mortal and inhuman
- flighty and savage
- cunning and icy
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
