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 media
Below is a list of describing words for media. 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 media:
- usual balmy
- physical spiritual
- physical
- universal aetherial
- odd cryptographic
- well-equipped japanese
- tame, trite
- same aetherial
- various data-storage
- off-putting and clumsy
- physically off-putting
- physically off-putting and clumsy
- negligibly dense
- completely visual
- moist inert
- independent unofficial
- mechanical inadequate
- noteworthy and frequent
- vocal and visual
- thicker temporal
- durable, digital
- transtemporal, interstellar
- original, durable
- partial and suspicious
- fundamental and primordial
- pre-existing nebulous
- commonplace but appropriate
- empty homogeneous
- brilliant and exacting
- damn visual
- authentic and time-honored
- several refractive
- perfectly inert and harmless
- various nutrient
- highly virile
- various refractive
- entirely honest and unvenal
- rarified gaseous
- honest and unvenal
- gullible western
- craven and helpless
- insatiably ruthless
- rare ethereal
- tenuous interplanetary
- ancient, low-density
- biological cultural
- indifferent scientific
- false and cloudy
- incredibly subtle and elastic
- natural and most serviceable
- adequate and pleasing
- universal electro-magnetic
- perfect linguistic
- wide and fluent
- spiritual physical
- rare but still material
- still material
- formal and human
- favorable and convenient
- imperceptible material
- comparatively translucent
- thick but comparatively translucent
- extremely mellow and beautiful
- extraordinarily excellent
- special and ready
- flexible and intelligible
- inconvenient and perishable
- strictly inorganic
- unwieldy and cumbersome
- neutral or even alkaline
- compact but sophisticated
- sophisticated final
- visible and powerful
- thin, unsatisfying
- gothic
- scrupulously fair and independent
- pale, obscure
- active and perceptive
- cloyingly foreign
- considerable unwanted
- tremendously resistant
- various pornographic
- elastic, inert
- unsupported and extinct
- strong fictional
- definitive dead
- superb, stable
- dead preliterate
- totally reflective
- serious dead
- sure-fire effective
- current digital
- ultra-temporal
- mutant recombinant
- gaseously liquid
- popular visual
- clunky dead
- penetrating transparent
- dead cultural
- specially standardized
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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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