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 john
Below is a list of describing words for john. 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 john:
- puritanical, young
- cross-legged, opposite
- inspiring bold
- dead, inspector-general
- old-time enemy--general
- expectant and far worthier
- rather profuse and imprudent
- illustrious and most benevolent
- general hooker--general
- brilliant, witty and humorous
- accurate, steadfast
- big consumptive
- stodgy, respectable
- gigantic and magnanimous
- fine latter-day
- quiet inert
- red-faced, good-natured
- sober, dreamy
- now coaxing
- equally fascinating and difficult
- amiss, gentle
- studious, unhappy
- joyous and thoughtless
- scarlet, little
- wistful and poignant
- brilliant, beautiful and cheerful
- bashful, clumsy
- convivial honest
- ambitious armenian
- sixteenth, old
- spiritual cheap
- peculiarly grave and silent
- delightful, honest
- showy, fascinating
- fifth, poor
- handsome, gorgeous
- honest, literal
- august fifth
- faithful steady
- excellent able
- unseen, uncouth
- blind and dear
- foolish and jealous
- governor-general, lieutenant-general
- heartless, miserable
- less, clever
- last perusal
- authoritative and old
- good, lumbering
- now able and willing
- hungry and agile
- least, excellent
- dumb dunstical
- honest, obtuse
- fourth rehearsal
- parliamentary business-like
- genial, loud-voiced
- missionary franciscan
- lazy, clever
- troubled stout-hearted
- quiet oppressed
- cruel major
- other, major-general
- thrifty and affectionate
- little amenable
- less glad
- irrepressible and hot-tempered
- convivial, honest
- general carter--brigadier-general
- venerable and truly great
- old reformer
- self-important, good-natured
- probable, dear
- jovial chinese
- genial runaway
- absolute old
- dear, dingy
- wrong-headed and impracticable
- studious and ingenious
- poor, pompous
- famous carmelite
- best-looking and worthiest
- slow, honest
- miniature, middle-aged
- pale but alert
- undeniably handsome and impressive
- latter-day gun-slinging
- whole cajun
- flat, willing
- green flat-bottomed
- more clean-shaven
- confident, dynamic
- recalcitrant lame
- rather profuse
- free, general
- virtuous and mild
- famous and excessively superstitious
- honest plain-spoken
- inspiring, bold
- swiftly long
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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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