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 literature
Below is a list of describing words for literature. 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 literature:
- contemporary periodical
- essentially tame and civilized
- essentially tame
- much periodical
- juvenile periodical
- knotty ancient
- foul atheistic
- magnificent and most original
- thoroughgoing commercial
- undesirable or painful
- current theosophical
- overt, general
- incredibly curious
- current periodical
- scientific and sceptical
- finest spectral
- genuinely spectral
- inferior theological
- complex oral
- own centuries-old
- journal, scientific
- irish periodical
- deistical and anti-deistical
- cheap contemporary
- great and characteristically modern
- largely entomological
- largely entomological and zoological
- copious legendary
- current entomological
- dramatic and general
- heroic literary
- fresh and magnificent
- serious japanese
- whole fictional
- especially periodical
- immortally illiterate
- vile socialistic
- mystical and academic
- automatically fantastic
- satirical, liberal and brilliant
- important analytic
- classical and polite
- british metaphysical
- senseless, filthy and disgusting
- poetic national
- classic nordic
- early apologetic
- tame and civilized
- profane french
- contemporary serious
- thoughtful or purposeful
- vulgar juvenile
- trivial romantic
- elder inflectional
- unproved, egyptian
- inflammatory and subversive
- defamatory political
- vast, periodical
- national humorous
- optimistic and alluring
- lower fictitious
- miscellaneous gaelic
- odd and obsolete
- dead medical
- permanent poetical
- periodical and general
- prevalent romantic
- portuguese dramatic
- current imaginative
- instructive and wholesome
- current ornithological
- best, romantic
- ephemeral controversial
- alone french
- sceptical and semi-sceptical
- british poetical
- hermetic and cognate
- insidious elizabethan
- philippine popular
- present satirical
- vigorous periodical
- thin and shapeless
- brief national
- musical historical
- contemporary fictitious
- frivolous ephemeral
- pedantic and profligate
- abundant mediaeval
- higher teutonic
- pernicious periodical
- main, periodical
- cheap juvenile
- fundamentally optimistic
- glossy, expensive
- otherwise comprehensive
- thoughtful and austere
- distinctively pastoral
- post-canonical jewish
- fashionable philosophic
- good, pure and wholesome
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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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