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 language
Below is a list of describing words for language. 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 language:
- official and common
- official, primary
- international auxiliary
- foul and abusive
- unequivocal and emphatic
- major african
- assorted strong
- peerless and unequivocal
- highly interpersonal
- variable and highly interpersonal
- stubborn and devilish
- straightforward, somber
- cumbersome and imperfect
- musical and prolific
- scientific universal
- cold, guttural
- guttural, simplistic
- insubordinate and obscene
- expressive and pertinent
- awkward and ambiguous
- harmonious metrical
- single oral
- common asian
- awful german
- racy, genuine
- figgeral
- profane, demonic
- foul or abusive
- much abusive
- hateful and guttural
- hieroglyphical and sacred
- complimentary and ceremonial
- pretentious and empty
- uncouth and unknown
- bold, uncivil
- classical and familiar
- largely universal
- characteristic but affectionate
- respectful but vigorous
- figurative eastern
- official and national
- rigid symbolic
- mute chemical
- violent or luxurious
- unknown and primordial
- liquid norwegian
- polite and rather old-fashioned
- original figurative
- untechnical, vivid
- eloquent and solemn
- especially metrical
- pathetic and startling
- plain and passionate
- respectful but plain
- strange, spidery
- universal auxiliary
- mortal sonic
- bland and formal
- excessively ornamental
- horrid, guttural
- expressive, intricate
- soft and charitable
- inadequate common
- foreign but similar
- completely made-up
- obsessively foul
- original colorful
- highly tonal
- passionate fierce
- metrical and coloured
- terse but terrific
- wonderfully terse and clear
- wonderfully terse
- dead or foreign
- simple untechnical
- premature mutinous
- gaelic or italian
- bold and figurative
- little uncivil
- mild, evangelical
- scriptural and prophetic
- utter disgusting
- chinese vocal
- strong and graphic
- slipshod, literary
- frankly archaic
- warm, skilful
- supplementary visual
- reasonably non-technical
- less clinical
- awfully posh
- distinctly unimaginative
- special-purpose technological
- inexorable french
- silent, arcane
- free and violent
- rude gutteral
- perfectly pure and simple
- servile and flattering
- discreet and ambiguous
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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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