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 jabs
Below is a list of describing words for jabs. 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 jabs:
- noticeably harder
- sideways short
- final, tiny
- little numbing
- unsubtle verbal
- short efficient
- various lightning-like
- swift painful
- savage, short
- reckless verbal
- successive downward
- glib political
- swift smashing
- brief coercive
- momentarily harder
- cold needle-like
- smashing right-hand
- vicious and quite involuntary
- psychological and cultural
- playful mental
- incompetent, clumsy but ornamental
- sharp but futile
- worse-than-normal
- sharp glassy
- embarrassingly soft
- sundry unintentional
- routinely vindictive
- wickedly cynical
- stinging left-hand
- clumsy, ineffectual
- quick swift
- final and ineffectual
- sharp and risky
- sharp, high-powered
- nice, nasty
- familiar mental
- hard swift
- clumsy but ornamental
- occasional verbal
- short terrific
- deliberate and painful
- stiff, quick
- quick lucky
- fast hard
- efficient short
- achingly sharp
- desperate, unfocused
- sharp, violent
- mild social
- sharp conversational
- unexpected verbal
- increasingly emphatic
- last comic
- swift cruel
- innumerable short
- fierce downward
- quick, confident
- sharp verbal
- few instinctive
- last playful
- intermittent blue
- clear and sudden
- quick and precise
- sharp, painful
- timid, tentative
- sharp painful
- sharp, angry
- sharp mental
- other playful
- sudden vertical
- wild, ineffectual
- several unnecessary
- quick, precise
- fast straight
- catty little
- swift, painful
- swift shallow
- sharp, blinding
- few exploratory
- vicious verbal
- more localized
- ambiguous little
- sharp, deep
- professional short
- short, polite
- bitchy little
- pleasurable little
- more ferocious
- painful little
- single vicious
- good emotional
- quite involuntary
- various painful
- last gentle
- little fake
- particularly sharp
- sharp internal
- short choppy
- last angry
- particularly pernicious
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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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