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 matter
Below is a list of describing words for matter. 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 matter:
- uneven wet
- minor or purely military
- perceptibly plain
- acrid and sour
- cortical grey
- condensed particulate
- normal and degenerate
- much fatty
- sloppy cranial
- delicate and fundamental
- animal fecal
- less frustrating
- entire irksome
- forth volcanic
- particulate and gaseous
- fecal and other
- compact cerebral
- grave but simple
- rather delicate and intricate
- relatively grave
- poetic or fantastic
- much lifeless
- brown, slippery
- smashing solid
- bad solid
- routine and rather dull
- dead organic
- colored particulate
- grayer gray
- enough particulate
- stray solar
- disgusting autobiographical
- singularly remote and vague
- inert, commonplace
- purple granular
- minor and purely military
- pleasantly simple
- degraded organic
- little fecal
- puzzling and urgent
- condensed primal
- barrayaran-internal
- purely barrayaran-internal
- brownish, granular
- animate inorganic
- human, immediate
- easier and commoner
- intensely private and personal
- flaccid or fatty
- infinitely rarified
- endless and very expensive
- quite different and personal
- different and personal
- glutinous or viscous
- native sordid
- other printed
- instructive and wonderful
- collateral and sometimes extraneous
- irresolvable nebulous
- uninteresting and unintelligible
- fragmented cellular
- soluble mineral
- much earthy
- filthy welcome
- continuous nuclear
- considerable lesser
- lethally serious
- internal, civil
- not-trivial
- doubtless inconsequential
- arduous and heroic
- grave and invaluable
- insufficient organic
- miniscule paltry
- merest everyday
- entire baffling
- important and very urgent
- mathematical or technical
- ultimately frigid
- condensed dark
- difficult and inextricable
- diffuse nebulous
- much starchy
- volatile and organic
- insane controversial
- mightily grave
- much supplementary
- deceased animal
- exceedingly glutinous
- much conjectural
- excretal
- brownish granular
- much illustrative
- undifferentiated protoplasmic
- fecal
- decayed animal
- dull braided
- holy fecal
- fancifully knotted
- certain procedural
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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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