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 mystery
Below is a list of describing words for mystery. 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 mystery:
- treacherous and infamous
- haunting and adorable
- appalling and unfathomable
- infinite savage
- pent-up religious
- crazy insoluble
- rich attractive
- favorite archeological
- sheer uncanny
- darkest, strangest
- genuinely satisfactory
- perpetual and unfathomable
- dark and pitiable
- sordid and fatal
- magnificent mock
- grotesque and archaic
- shadowy and menacing
- haunting and alluring
- terrible perplexing
- singular and insoluble
- terrible and golden
- certain sexy
- big perverse
- solemn psychological
- adorable and ineffable
- inscrutable venerable
- shadowy allegoric
- portal, motherless
- jealous professional
- stormy and ominous
- puzzling, overwhelming
- silent, impenetrable
- elusive and ethereal
- thy vexing
- good thrilling
- unnamed and sweetest
- invisible and inexplicable
- deep and unending
- eerily featureless
- astounding acoustic
- hopelessly unfathomable
- intolerable and terrible
- sublime and impenetrable
- universal fatal
- complete and inexplicable
- profound or deep
- adorable and incomprehensible
- surprising and overwhelming
- secret and altogether wonderful
- primeval and terrible
- hitherto inscrutable
- profound and most sacred
- charming but insoluble
- intolerable and gigantic
- warm triumphant
- peculiar and not injurious
- spiritual and unfathomable
- certain glossy
- deep and possibly eternal
- formal or classic
- absolutely baffling
- ast and impenetrable
- ancient, demonic
- largely unexplained
- frightening and largely unexplained
- controversial musical
- profound forensic
- dark, capricious
- real and perhaps tragic
- incomprehensibly vast and menacing
- unique and poignant
- inscrutable and ever-increasing
- complete and unsolved
- awful and unfathomable
- hideous additional
- secret or small
- strange, ever-changing
- sacred, insoluble
- strange initial
- necessarily inscrutable
- painfully unsolved
- amazing, intangible
- abnormal and sinister
- all-powerful and terrible
- such deepest
- sudden old-world
- inward unnamed
- unfathomable and divine
- solemn and murky
- minor unsolved
- awful but beautiful
- passionate or pathetic
- tenacious, watchful
- somewhat orphic
- delicious, brilliant
- plausible and pretentious
- dreadful, unfathomable
- infinitely pathetic and picturesque
- immediate dizzy
- divine and elusive
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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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