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 music
Below is a list of describing words for music. 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 music:
- enough classic
- fresh, thy
- soft classical
- heavy, atonal
- classical or contemporary
- coarse and discordant
- equally coarse and discordant
- now grand and somber
- soft instrumental
- catchy fill-in
- seriously morose
- equally stylized
- vocally extravagant
- appropriate triumphant
- thrilling martial
- such perforated
- joyful metal
- alien, polytonal
- gloomy liturgical
- soft, elder
- italian florid
- barest simple
- sooo impressive
- french instrumental
- grave, far-reaching
- glorious invisible
- gloriously indignant
- loud and heroic
- brassy military
- romantic-revival
- orchestral and ethnic
- solemn, triumphal
- �vocal
- faint, important
- dim sedate
- plaintive, fairy
- beauteous and pure
- unmistakable new
- inspiration--real
- drink--real inspiration--real
- classical and military
- merriest and most ingenious
- vocal and instrumental
- loud thin
- ceaseless harsh
- scientifically compacted
- basal popular
- rowdy cajun
- powerful and rhythmic
- high-volume, fast-paced
- always hollow
- airy and translucent
- absolute or instrumental
- loud queer
- brash and impulsive
- faint exquisite
- beautiful and evocative
- prettiest and most talented
- skillful, evocative
- delicate, melodic
- concerted vocal
- overhead, ethereal
- loud classical
- rotten ethnic
- subliminal patriotic
- faint classical
- wild, pagan
- harmonious and joyous
- wonderfully harmonious and joyous
- innocuous and silly young
- bloody original
- barbaric, intoxicating
- esoteric german
- mindless, sugary
- open, excess
- eerie unfamiliar
- somewhere strange
- rhythmical and exquisite
- sorrowfully beautiful
- martial but most inharmonious
- severe orchestral
- inner rhythmical
- far-off choral
- finer, simpler
- cold, insidious
- welcome vehicular
- extravagant and complex
- purely instrumental
- still sad
- again--mortal
- noble austere
- low, percussive
- full-throated, sweet
- barbaric, monotonous
- strident chinese
- indeed sublime
- incredibly dulcet
- nonliturgical
- human classical
- oddly atonal
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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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