Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 knowledge

Below is a list of describing words for knowledge. 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 knowledge:

  • large and freely available
  • deep technical
  • intimate local
  • find--impersonal
  • rudimentary, scientific
  • far-reaching and intimate
  • clear and extraordinary
  • tranquilizing personal
  • transcendent true
  • unpalatable, unavoidable
  • rational or abstract
  • painfully intimate
  • wholesome elementary
  • full and precisely accurate
  • ethnobiological
  • immense and encyclopedic
  • intimate practical
  • various and exotic
  • highest perfect
  • imperfect geographical
  • least linguistic
  • keen but limited
  • intuitive and abstract
  • inferior scientific
  • fullest and most sympathetic
  • cosmic and superhuman
  • partially unified
  • true useful
  • intimate geographical
  • abstract and intuitive
  • thorough anatomical
  • scientific and therapeutic
  • abundant and perpetual
  • various and almost universal
  • pre-eminent practical
  • precocious and cynical
  • unlawful carnal
  • exactly general
  • somber and tranquil
  • often blood-chilling
  • basically private
  • enough magickal
  • experimental, individual
  • extensive and accurate
  • private, subtle
  • smooth, ingrained
  • sensitive, intimate
  • exquisite and laborious
  • mathematical and medicinal
  • previous or superior
  • simple, intellectual
  • exact academic
  • previous photographic
  • incontestable, clear
  • curiously technical
  • unquestionable scientific
  • sensuous and rational
  • exact elementary
  • vast special
  • complete and skilful
  • fancy and imperfect
  • consequently superficial
  • dull but very useful
  • vain and verbal
  • certainly rational
  • abstract or rational
  • apt, great
  • exact ethical
  • perceptive or intuitive
  • accurate and astonishing
  • fatal intimate
  • definitely ascertainable
  • common rational
  • intuitive or expressive
  • genuine, systematic
  • fatal unreasoning
  • sufficient anatomical
  • enough geologic
  • limited first-hand
  • useless and violent
  • general useful
  • tremendous and completely reliable
  • ample and real
  • vague and spectral
  • filmy corrupt
  • pitifully scant
  • abstracted and superlative
  • wonderful topographical
  • intuitive and easy
  • wide and intimate
  • real, certain
  • superficial and partial
  • wonderfully exact and exhaustive
  • sufficient exact
  • full reflective
  • intimate and exhaustive
  • systematic and accurate
  • superficial but true
  • profound and sensible
  • merely divine

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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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