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 notion
Below is a list of describing words for notion. 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 notion:
- earlier unsettling
- awful clear
- sufficiently false
- asinine and dangerous
- loose and ignorant
- weird and farfetched
- fiendishly tempting
- fundamentally unsettling
- distinctly foolish
- halfway bright
- briefly attractive
- momentary horrifying
- old saburral
- artistic, literary
- panicky, hopeless
- hopefully innovative
- specific but quite adequate
- outrageous and dangerous
- dear abstract
- subtle, superstitious
- silly anthropomorphic
- primary and common
- dim unrealized
- improbable and foolish
- appallingly absurd
- vulgar but very general
- profoundly naive
- admirably bold
- foolish and aberrational
- original conspiratorial
- stupidly romantic
- trumped-up romantic
- fairly astounding
- somewhat galling
- risky and fanciful
- pyramidal, triumphant
- admittedly ridiculous
- weird puritanical
- corny and totally ridiculous
- proper and thoroughly teutonic
- more-or-less accurate
- ancient and more-or-less accurate
- particular preconceived
- false, imperfect
- ruinously false
- fleeting wistful
- weirdest conceptual
- nevertheless plausible
- wild but nevertheless plausible
- old spenglerian
- singular and erroneous
- deal clearer
- idle superficial
- modern and sensible
- dim mathematical
- saburral
- proper jewish
- pharisaical, superstitious
- merest raw
- sick weary
- original unworthy
- vivid and approximately accurate
- hazy but dreadful
- conventional artistic
- western orthodox
- sentimental and heathenish
- dim, frenzied
- single old-world
- flippant, sugared
- vile, unspiritual
- probably ill-founded
- fine imaginary
- feeble and foolish
- desperately bright
- reasonably smart
- next idle
- faintly blasphemous
- demonstrably flawed
- hazy but terrible
- perfectly scary
- extraordinarily practical
- chimerical and groundless
- postulational
- modern, permissive
- childish romantic
- thoroughly disquieting
- quite incorrect
- fanciful and sorrowful
- flashy empty
- comprehensive but indeterminate
- hazy modern
- vivid and probably erroneous
- indistinct and inadequate
- horrible, unaccountable
- distinct or adequate
- vulgar jewish
- miserable fantastic
- religious and only philosophic
- odd vulgar
- leviathan and perverse
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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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