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 object
Below is a list of describing words for object. 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 object:
- singular, irreplaceable
- glorious and refreshing
- true immovable
- unexpected metal
- smooth, huge
- discontinuously probable
- improbably garish
- undefined but important
- terrible, cylindrical
- naturally lovable
- balefully interesting
- selfish or unjust
- devouringly interesting
- silvery rectangular
- dark hemispherical
- strangely banal
- convincing inanimate
- mysterious papery
- enchanting and vivid
- whatsoever dim and humble
- whatsoever dim
- sole engrossing
- big conspicuous
- next and most serious
- wrinkled, silvery
- main and ultimate
- funny ceramic
- unpleasantly functional
- unexpected familiar
- nearby bright
- irregularly spherical
- rare noteworthy
- ever favorite
- collateral and very important
- discussions--real
- priceless or vital
- occasional recognizable
- virtually intangible
- green-metal
- small green-metal
- huge delicate
- mangled, tattered
- jaded, spiritless
- obscure but lawful
- semi-cylindrical black
- conical, metallic
- utterly extraordinary
- largest movable
- large immovable
- largest airless
- powerful and precious
- avowed and essential
- bulky oblong
- convivial, beautiful
- hulking rectangular
- familiar glassy
- supposedly immovable
- ceremonial forked
- hairy, bushy
- frightful ragged
- dubious magical
- unfamiliar aerial
- comfortingly stable
- possible oncoming
- dank or dark
- unreasonably attractive
- playful and inconvenient
- triangular well-defined
- small and ominous
- natural astronomical
- oval, metal
- spherical hollow
- new moonlike
- precious and deathless
- rare collectible
- nearly oblong
- solid, oblong
- invisible but precious
- dim and humble
- deformed, unrecognizable
- venerable and ornamental
- ocular and visible
- greatest or principal
- impossible ideal
- ludicrous and pitiable
- striking or particular
- equidistant low
- grand hazy
- surprisingly monstrous
- green, simple
- animal or inanimate
- totally wonderful
- no-dimensional
- fastest man-made
- stationary and reliable
- inexpressibly cheap and nasty
- inexpressibly cheap
- obvious and sumptuous
- definite and circumscribed
- fake fake
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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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