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 leader

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

  • alpha red
  • cunning mercenary
  • other, self-styled
  • presently social
  • urbane mundane
  • wary mercenary
  • real, competent
  • charismatic religious
  • fearless military
  • renowned planetary
  • beloved and renowned
  • skinny and wrinkled
  • revolutionary and visionary
  • noted social
  • unpredictable and inflammatory
  • definitely ruthless
  • effective tribal
  • still pale and shaky
  • wily flathead
  • n-n-natural
  • respectable, bespectacled
  • mighty and cunning
  • stern but competent
  • own messianic
  • single titular
  • longtime palestinian
  • major spiritual
  • edgy mercenary
  • clear-cut and powerful
  • misguided, evil
  • capable and generous
  • highly capable and generous
  • grey-haired, scarred
  • wise and tireless
  • crafty mercenary
  • capable and hard-nosed
  • extraordinarily capable and hard-nosed
  • great and shrewd
  • gallant and mysterious
  • brave and mysterious
  • mysterious and still unknown
  • enigmatic and inspirational
  • new fearless
  • unexpectedly skilled
  • exalted, heroic
  • wise and most glorious
  • fairly ineffective
  • outstanding psychic
  • extremely astute and wise
  • tall and black-bearded
  • youthful, dynamic
  • polish partisan
  • beloved bloody
  • gifted native
  • skilled partisan
  • intrepid and popular
  • well-known zionist
  • wise libyan
  • well-known and violent
  • prominent communist
  • ordinary divisional
  • wily political
  • dull and conscientious
  • sole identifiable
  • complacently boastful
  • favorite and heroic
  • prominant
  • strong choral
  • dead paramount
  • cunning and ornery
  • gentle and daring
  • greedy and scheming
  • unwise or ineffectual
  • fiery and controversial
  • appealing and charismatic
  • weak and inept
  • temporary survival
  • nomadic religious
  • single charismatic
  • articulate and strong
  • broken-nosed, scarred
  • cruel but brilliant
  • alert nationalist
  • cal military
  • tough but amiable
  • confident terrorist
  • courageous and charismatic
  • influential popular
  • conciliatory, brave
  • wise, blind
  • egyptian feminist
  • unfortunate and incompetent
  • huge and wary
  • wary, powerful
  • stronger, double
  • humanist and jewish
  • gallant and majestic
  • new palestinian
  • prudent and wary
  • likely popular

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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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