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 narratives
Below is a list of describing words for narratives. 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 narratives:
- prophetical and parabolical
- otherwise bald and unconvincing
- slightly toneless
- bald and unconvincing
- several eerie
- coherent and readable
- cosmogonical and diluvial
- correct consensual
- fictitious and fanciful
- limited omniscient
- copious and candid
- particular and contemporary
- full circumstantial
- succinct but clear
- curious, old-world
- adverse and contradictory
- frightful and heart-rending
- luminous and readable
- tedious and desultory
- otherwise unreliable
- simple circumstantial
- honest and curious
- coherent and internally self-consistent
- concise and superficial
- quaint but happy
- prospectively popular
- concise, abbreviated
- straightforward dynamic
- corresponding biblical
- intelligible and authentic
- accurate and vivacious
- tedious, bare
- excessive tedious
- deeply interesting and full
- vivid and substantially accurate
- intimate, classic
- suitable and authentic
- engrossing and instructive
- chronologically progressive
- otherwise bald
- historical and pseudohistorical
- short but real
- usually simple and clear
- social linear
- together popular
- single four-part
- ancient, fictitious and fanciful
- lyrical poetic
- incredible or impossible
- somewhat choppy and repetitious
- probable and honorable
- graphic and thrilling
- self-serving and very subjective
- condensed and imperfect
- fantastic or irrelevant
- extraordinary coming-of-age
- virulent and pernicious
- plain, unscientific
- accurate tactical
- delightfully clear and probable
- accurate and sober
- breezy, wholesome
- suggestive and characteristic
- necessarily dry and tedious
- perplexing and uncritical
- fragmentary and one-sided
- vivid precise
- graphic but imaginative
- remarkably sensible and well-written
- racy and startling
- striking and straightforward
- earliest and most particular
- brief, unassuming
- expressive and luminous
- intelligible and animated
- animated or impressive
- concise and unadorned
- exhaustive and faithful
- modest and unegotistical
- apparently candid and simple
- critical and continuous
- quite ridiculous and absurd
- fuller and evidently original
- interesting and manifestly authentic
- homely metrical
- wonderfully direct and unbroken
- little fictitious
- internally self-consistent
- earlier fragmentary
- touchingly pathetic
- secret historical
- beautiful and artless
- fully intelligible
- long prosy
- bald and monotonous
- long, coherent
- seemingly bald
- supremely idiosyncratic
- seemingly bald and monotonous
- pointless and interminable
Popular Searches
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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