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 materials
Below is a list of describing words for materials. 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 materials:
- industrial raw
- most raw
- basic raw
- initial raw
- essential raw
- free raw
- abundant raw
- lunar raw
- available raw
- valuable raw
- supply raw
- useful raw
- vital raw
- scarce, raw
- enough flammable
- agricultural raw
- important raw
- cheap raw
- metal and unknown
- not�real
- former perishable
- principal raw
- freer raw
- bulky raw
- ultimate raw
- limitless raw
- cheaper raw
- organic raw
- bright filmy
- valuable and most instructive
- necessary raw
- selected hard
- mass-produced artificial
- luscious and magical
- better structural
- potentially objectionable
- resistant synthetic
- artificially radioactive
- formal promotional
- richest and most authentic
- loose or incoherent
- grander mental
- fibrous raw
- cement-making
- comparatively incoherent
- heretofore unpoetical
- other raw
- genetic or biological
- critical raw
- canadian raw
- enormously ponderous
- proper raw
- various but not discordant
- supply copious and distinct
- supply copious
- ordinary and durable
- sufficient raw
- capital, raw
- vital heavy
- strategic and critical
- heterogeneous and discordant
- abundant and authentic
- dangerously radioactive
- scarce raw
- stuffy poetic
- exotic raw
- native, natural
- usual synthetic
- composite precious
- chinese raw
- sure, abundant
- different raw
- animal raw
- ordinary incoherent
- mineral raw
- opposite and unpromising
- sparse and prosaic
- original and raw
- generally cheap
- contrary and diverse
- else refractory
- body-building
- simply raw
- seasoned and other
- rude and motley
- always raw
- various raw
- inorganic, water-soluble
- fly nuclear
- original or better
- heaviest raw
- superb raw
- toughest and thickest
- fewer raw
- crucial raw
- simpler raw
- chief raw
- agreeable nutritive
- precise raw
- original and hitherto unused
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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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