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 letters
Below is a list of describing words for letters. 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 letters:
- awkward, shaky
- long, handwritten
- exacting, painful
- blue capital
- felicitous delightful
- still subsequent
- small, alarming
- lovely heartbreaking
- shaky, amateurish
- fine congratulatory
- daring, wonderful
- dear & gentle
- scathing, powerful
- personal, hand-written
- deliciously illiterate
- absorbingly readable
- long and trivial
- sparkling and absorbingly readable
- muddy blobby
- scarlet initial
- sundry well-worn
- virulent and anonymous
- careful curved
- long and rather hysterical
- black capital
- ecstatic and very long
- pictorial initial
- penultimate alphabetical
- angry or ignorant
- long and carefully worked-out
- loving, appealing
- queerly different
- tiny crabbed
- final and queerly different
- red capital
- circular, circular
- careful capital
- plain but respectful
- colored initial
- hearty and comfortable
- also anonymous
- spirited and candid
- complimentary and affectionate
- magnificently protective
- heartlessly infrequent
- plans--ironical
- brown faint
- military plans--ironical
- admirable and conciliatory
- creditable and handsome
- encyclical
- green capital
- subsequent caustic
- foul long
- warm and stringent
- titanic egyptian
- brief and very spirited
- wrong initial
- wicked anonymous
- wild or maudlin
- private and interminable
- secret italian
- warm congratulatory
- precise, blocky
- somewhat vague and declamatory
- coloured capital
- occasionally informative
- plainly readable
- grossly happy
- passionate and highly humorous
- curt and somewhat angry
- them--official
- abusive anonymous
- fair capital
- short calm
- decorative initial
- antique, chivalrous
- many and facetious
- ninth pastoral
- excellent, courageous
- shameless and insolent
- mischievous spanish
- stern and true
- initial or capital
- unquestionably pompous
- irish dead
- flaming electric
- glaring, electric
- profuse capital
- foolish and impudent
- dominical
- careful red
- last, troubling
- myriad official
- flattering congratulatory
- small no-nonsense
- breezy lighthearted
- caustic and combative
- antique handwritten
- five-inch fluorescent
Popular Searches
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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