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 listener
Below is a list of describing words for listener. 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 listener:
- rapt and attentive
- unheeded and silent
- keen and paranoid
- rapt and enthusiastic
- devout but nearly silent
- unimpassioned and calm
- eager but unsuccessful
- new and apparently attentive
- interested and imaginative
- latest and most reluctant
- constant and respectful
- silent humorous
- credulous, polite
- particularly retentive
- sedate or attentive
- silent but attentive
- attentive and grave
- new willing
- sensitive, good
- trusting and active
- silent but willing
- eager but hitherto silent
- painfully observant
- eager and ready
- grave, unresponsive
- silent and uncomfortable
- silent and rather inattentive
- charming and attentive
- attentive but impassive
- eager and even sympathetic
- mighty talented
- helplessly sympathetic
- inexperienced and unmusical
- interested and congenial
- grave and abstracted
- silent but inattentive
- attentive and enthusiastic
- genuine, voluntary
- solitary and attentive
- rapt and girlish
- inquisitive and silent
- new and really beautiful
- rare and attentive
- quiet but interested
- interested but scarcely sympathetic
- passive and dispassionate
- silent and unwilling
- appreciative masculine
- unwilling and bashful
- willing and sympathetic
- evidently sympathetic and intelligent
- evidently sympathetic
- unwilling and distressed
- interested and sympathetic
- loving, interested
- loyal and attentive
- apparently attentive
- interested but silent
- white and terror-stricken
- new and perhaps naive
- habitual and careful
- obviously sympathetic
- terrific, terrific
- sympathetic and notoriously inquisitive
- refined and congenial
- polite, willing
- new and appreciative
- merry, intelligent
- silent and meditative
- amiable and interested
- agreeable and sympathetic
- attentive and silent
- attentive and critical
- infinitely stronger and more
- pale mute
- closely attentive
- properly appreciative
- appreciative and intelligent
- singularly polite
- merry intelligent
- beautiful and interested
- eager and nervous
- obedient grateful
- gracious, intelligent
- credulous and complaisant
- absent nor inattentive
- silent, unsuspected
- ready and appreciative
- profoundly attentive
- deeply interested but silent
- silent but not uninterested
- single interested
- sober and cool
- courteous and even eager
- somewhat susceptible
- seemingly attentive
- volatile and indifferent
- willing and interested
- observant or critical
- interested and grateful
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
