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 nightmare
Below is a list of describing words for nightmare. 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 nightmare:
- frantic and tireless
- classic slow-motion
- frantic and variegated
- sweaty razor-sharp
- vile menstrual
- ancient and once passive
- own viral
- perpetual and horrid
- ridiculous recurrent
- hauntingly inexorable
- somehow elusive
- chronic, subclinical
- long sanitary
- nineteenth-century pseudo-oriental
- worst freudian
- absolute bureaucratic
- horrible, real-life
- absurd, awful
- wicked and endless
- constant, continuous
- once passive
- gruesome, fantastic
- foul and ominous
- hideous and oppressive
- vague, recurrent
- sheer, horrible
- logistic and psychosocial
- particularly vivid and terrifying
- nineteenth worst
- unbelievable kafkaesque
- mad and horrible
- grossly fantastic
- unusually persistent and recurrent
- personal and unshakable
- feverish, fitful
- fiery cubist
- hideous, slow
- fearful alcoholic
- pervasive urban
- demented, paranoid
- vivid and especially terrifying
- complex but unreal
- classic feminist
- hideous, fascinating
- fuzzy and more
- endless claustrophobic
- bitter and icy
- cumbersome man-made
- drunk fractal
- spirited, riotous
- fantastic aural
- grim unwholesome
- hot torrid
- wretched babylonian
- singular recurrent
- indefensibly delightful
- dreadful musical
- vivid and weird
- unusually vivid and weird
- vivid and revolting
- tangled, hideous
- perpetual mathematical
- particularly vivid and coherent
- haggard but quite painless
- pruriently horrible
- filthy, aimless
- dreadful doggie
- huge unspeakable
- indistinct and haunting
- horrid, persistent
- unwieldy, clumsy
- violent and vivid
- more-traditional
- disturbing, sinister
- persistent and recurrent
- quiet, black
- wild, confusing
- ultimate corporate
- brief episodic
- hideous, ongoing
- undulating feathery
- terribly realistic
- landlocked seaside
- bloated sexual
- chaotic, terrifying
- vast foul
- sad impossible
- fevered and terrifying
- proverbial worst
- adtectural
- worst and very secret
- sheer logistical
- whole devastating
- long, inescapable
- dark, listless
- ongoing nonstop
- unspeakably bloody
- blind, sickening
- horrible anthropomorphic
- proper smarmy
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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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