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 magnitude
Below is a list of describing words for magnitude. 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 magnitude:
- finite determinate
- unimaginable but visible
- possible finite
- apparent visual
- plain heroic
- low apparent
- constant unchangeable
- low absolute
- particular tangible
- faint, fifteenth
- wonderful comparative
- smallest telescopic
- stupendous and almost incredible
- constant determinate
- absolute visible
- similarly trifling
- twelfth or fifteenth
- maximum absolute
- unique, large
- same diametrical
- deadly relentless
- stupendous, terrifying
- equally unsolicited and unexpected
- equally unsolicited
- apparent or retinal
- completely indeterminate
- greatest and most enormous
- advisable or possible
- fourth, eleventh
- faint, eleventh
- finite numerical
- photovisual
- twelfth apparent
- current actual
- sensible apparent
- present inorganic
- unusual proportionate
- constant, determinate
- substantial and inspiring
- special and awful
- new seventh
- sublime and wonderful
- tenth or twentieth
- literally cosmic
- somehow sheer
- necessary but tolerable
- indefinable unaffected
- eventually absolute
- unfrequently considerable
- tricubical
- bicubical or tricubical
- bicubical
- thirteenth stellar
- next fainter
- photographic and photovisual
- visual or photovisual
- fainter ninth
- purely visible
- healthy and respectable
- great and almost equal
- ninth visual
- stupendous and amazing
- small visible
- sheer fantastic
- vast and incomparable
- real stellar
- highly elusive
- average absolute
- faint stellar
- lesser tangible
- gigantic and overwhelming
- definite linear
- similarly powerful
- dim fourth
- such unheralded
- inexplicable moral
- enormous real
- enormous actual
- apparent fifth
- such breathtaking
- vast and unbounded
- twelfth or thirteenth
- full and formidable
- definite finite
- truly patriarchal
- mere territorial
- same visible
- stunning, overwhelming
- potential moral
- little or great
- small tangible
- greater angular
- present impressive
- saga-like
- considerable apparent
- increasingly boring
- great proportional
- actually infinite
- smallest apparent
- tangible and visible
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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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