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 merit
Below is a list of describing words for merit. 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 merit:
- real and almost equal
- extraordinary neutral
- personal and superior
- unimpeachable literary
- equal artistic
- intrinsic and silent
- unattended and naked
- inherent and comparative
- unobtrusive literary
- slowly poetical
- awkward, disagreeable
- chief and abiding
- devout or ritual
- chief and most fundamental
- scanty poetical
- great and very obvious
- aesthetic or cultural
- considerable esthetic
- relative literary
- intrinsic, individual
- superior and uncommon
- transcendent poetic
- unequal but real
- undoubtedly singular
- agricultural or pictorial
- diverse but equal
- once sure
- transcendent personal
- indifferent architectural
- prime but rather subtle
- equal literary
- mere unassisted
- artistic, esthetic
- rewarding literary
- intrinsic literary
- cupational
- obvious and colossal
- extraordinary or striking
- easy or inconsiderable
- accidental or shadowy
- unequal technical
- similar and practically equal
- moderate poetical
- intellectual or poetical
- paramount and essential
- incontestable technical
- solid and sedate
- poetic or essential
- canine intellectual
- typographic and literary
- discerning real
- rewarding especial
- own unheralded
- high and inexhaustible
- nowadays modest
- skill and genuine
- rewarding individual
- equal and perhaps superior
- conspicuous accidental
- unassuming modest
- further rare
- rigorous, superior
- depressing unusual
- broad and easily recognizable
- humble, unacknowledged
- sufficient rhetorical
- rewarding true
- apparent poetic
- less or superior
- fugitive or unobtrusive
- crystal better
- rewarding deserving
- worth, exalted
- high sculptural
- solid well-known
- real and unobtrusive
- scanty architectural
- dramatic but poetical
- certain horrifying
- uncommon and enviable
- mere authorial
- unsuccessful, such
- lesser architectural
- nevertheless dubious
- chief but nevertheless dubious
- greatest crowning
- forward doubtful and unnoticed
- forward doubtful
- doubtful and unnoticed
- lower but similar
- unique and highest
- high artistical
- inferior poetical
- average conversational
- low and negative
- peculiar, quintessential
- rewarding unobtrusive
- worth and modest
- worth and substantial
- antiseptic or therapeutic
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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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