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 noticing
Below is a list of describing words for noticing. 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 noticing:
- of--biographical
- such short
- special and vehement
- routine gossipy
- partial biographical
- large and rather grimy
- nearest biographical
- peremptory judicial
- mound--historical
- jemez--historical
- worth modern
- dour glaring
- perfectly superb
- particularly worth
- unfairly short
- short or nonexistent
- big grubby
- devil--biographical
- short characteristical
- special and complimentary
- rarely appreciative
- general, biographical
- bridge--biographical
- carolina--biographical
- troops--biographical
- smashing fine
- circular official
- else previous
- usually previous
- faintest further
- undue and often inconvenient
- generously long
- circular and public
- such non-existent
- official navigational
- daily respectful
- somewhat attentive
- simple, curt
- deserving distinct
- religious sacrilegious
- scanty and unsympathetic
- flattering general
- ample biographical
- accordingly worth
- solitary authentic
- earliest worth
- solitary and incidental
- concise but expressive
- undoubtedly unfavorable
- special and undoubtedly unfavorable
- velasquez--biographical
- professedly confidential
- chiefly deserving
- brief but curious
- specially worth
- briefer effusive
- --_bibliographical
- alphabetical biographical
- deserving historical
- worth particular
- deserving especial
- worthy special
- dull and dubious
- nice pathetic
- terse and succinct
- surprisingly scrupulous
- savory biographical
- affectionate and eloquent
- especially worth
- humane and laudatory
- exceedingly humane and laudatory
- due and public
- especial and frequent
- older but briefer
- last, due
- lawful joint
- mineral worth
- public and unexpected
- inconceivably inadequate
- indirect and laudatory
- principally deserving
- short and unobtrusive
- abroad special
- least and most innocent
- nonresident, personal
- respectfully condescending
- excellent and appreciative
- bankruptcy-transferral
- generous and well-written
- exciting special
- brief distinctive
- necessary but civil
- brief but sufficiently lengthy
- honorary biographical
- deserving particular
- principally worth
- excellent and exceptional
- agent--biographical
- diplomatic agent--biographical
- forge--biographical
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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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