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 lustre

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

  • now miraculous
  • bright but transitory
  • glaring doubtful
  • white, unimpassioned
  • fitful and garish
  • obscure and hazy
  • pink metallic
  • feeble metallic
  • odd glassy
  • purest and most pleasing
  • unbroken metallic
  • transparent, amber
  • slow unhealthy
  • mild, unclouded
  • new and far-reaching
  • deep, glossy
  • wild sulphurous
  • implacably virginal
  • genuine silvery
  • metallic or glassy
  • intrinsic and overpowering
  • bright but fictitious
  • brilliant and silky
  • red or metallic
  • crimson and humid
  • golden emerald
  • unusually bright and happy
  • customary youthful
  • faint and deceitful
  • patrial and paternal
  • spotless and incomparable
  • peculiar silky
  • peculiar soulful
  • unclouded and faultless
  • false and dazzling
  • cold and spotless
  • metallic poisonous
  • fierce and preternatural
  • grey and opaque
  • saddened amethystine
  • phosphorescent, greenish
  • pleasing mellow
  • pale and virgin
  • motionless and glassy
  • truculent blue-black
  • vague, diffuse
  • bright and tremulous
  • pale, doubtful
  • silky iridescent
  • peculiar sleepless
  • remarkably silvery
  • old mild
  • coppery metallic
  • various and inimitable
  • mild but insufficient
  • silky or metallic
  • soft but rich
  • delicate muffled
  • rather waxy
  • native graceful
  • fine triumphant
  • dull, translucent
  • changeable, metallic
  • glaring, doubtful
  • permanent silky
  • pearly iridescent
  • full and mild
  • opalescent lunar
  • elusive reddish
  • fine former
  • metallic glossy
  • somewhat velvety
  • greenish, metallic
  • excellent translucent
  • unendurable naked
  • unnatural and indescribable
  • vivid and angry
  • otherwise dazzling
  • same purest
  • brighter or steadier
  • pink and bluish
  • mere milky
  • broad uncertain
  • peculiar, silvery
  • weak metallic
  • pale and moonlike
  • deep, ambrosial
  • dead metallic
  • smoky, lurid
  • animated liquid
  • final inner
  • brilliant metallic
  • additional and quite charming
  • sombre metallic
  • bright, febrile
  • brilliant pale-blue
  • metallic, coppery
  • legitimate and brilliant
  • tranquil unchanging
  • intense and radiant

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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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