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 item
Below is a list of describing words for item. 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 item:
- mighty impolite
- specific architectural
- biggest and most dramatic
- surprisingly prosaic
- deceptively irrelevant
- single unsatisfactory
- solitary unsatisfactory
- elusive and still unidentified
- vaguely valuable
- exotic or rare
- glaring little
- lush or luxurious
- big black-market
- other transportable
- minor, additional
- instantly salable
- economically attractive
- less salable
- tiny, small
- popular and impressive
- trivial or not-so-trivial
- not-so-trivial
- inevitable and comparatively inconsiderable
- thankless annual
- unassailably successful
- interesting and impersonal
- malignant magical
- small but fairly valuable
- noncash
- bi-coastal
- informal bi-coastal
- small supplemental
- primitive and practically universal
- usable magical
- last and most valuable
- fabulous and evocative
- potentially big-budget
- truly irreplaceable
- annoyingly intriguing
- last intriguing
- single unpacked
- comparatively scarce and expensive
- larger battery-powered
- nasty, striking
- powerful, sentient
- contemptible and helpless
- essential but relatively trifling
- least nor lowest
- real and most weighty
- sole agreeable
- grudging, conservative
- neutral indeterminate
- comparatively trifling and casual
- least disconcerting
- ill-defined and scarcely definable
- indeterminate but considerable
- new considerable
- erroneous and entirely incorrect
- anomalous but most formidable
- professional and curious
- two-line personal
- substantial and promising
- valuable contributory
- single ridiculous
- delectable surgical
- single custom-made
- crudely considerate
- chief irritating
- satisfactory and significant
- abundant single
- equally available
- serious and distinctly disagreeable
- insubordinate and turbulent
- trivial and miscellaneous
- equally native
- still unidentified
- good, spicy
- truly baffling
- particularly moribund
- small and relatively inexpensive
- personally urgent
- equally inherent and important
- equally inherent
- magical key
- physically flawed or incomplete
- ineligible or too heavy
- individual or magical
- �^seasonal
- inadequately tacky
- new, splendid
- mass-reproduced
- cheap mass-reproduced
- exceedingly precious and fragile
- healthy, usable
- greater once-in-a-lifetime
- mostmagical
- ordinarily visible
- \~thefinal
- sturdy and handsome
- other magickal
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.
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