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 objects
Below is a list of describing words for objects. 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 objects:
- singular, irreplaceable
- glorious and refreshing
- true immovable
- queer indescribable
- ordinary and visible
- unexpected metal
- usually embarrassing
- smooth, huge
- material and animate
- 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
- absolutely indefinable
- mysterious papery
- enchanting and vivid
- whatsoever dim and humble
- whatsoever dim
- sole engrossing
- irregular hard
- big conspicuous
- remote and not well-understood
- next and most serious
- brilliant or singular
- wrinkled, silvery
- main and ultimate
- ceramic or metallic
- funny ceramic
- gray, ellipsoidal
- unpleasantly functional
- individual golden
- unexpected familiar
- just inanimate
- nearby bright
- bafflingly textured
- irregularly spherical
- coloured and bafflingly textured
- rare noteworthy
- wild or hateful
- ever favorite
- real and compassionate
- collateral and very important
- stray, queer
- discussions--real
- surreal hallucinatory
- priceless or vital
- unidentified ballistic
- occasional recognizable
- distant and immaterial
- virtually intangible
- alien dusty
- green-metal
- unadjusted several
- small green-metal
- symmetrical natural
- huge delicate
- pleasant visible
- mangled, tattered
- jaded, spiritless
- obscure but lawful
- semi-cylindrical black
- conical, metallic
- utterly extraordinary
- largest movable
- unidentified opalescent
- large immovable
- unknown majestic
- largest airless
- utterly unusable
- powerful and precious
- useless and utterly unusable
- avowed and essential
- meaningless and terrible
- bulky oblong
- pale decayed
- convivial, beautiful
- fascinating and unfathomable
- hulking rectangular
- reliably tangible
- familiar glassy
- own and therefore proper
- supposedly immovable
- theoretically edible
- ceremonial forked
- lumpy, bulky
- hairy, bushy
- handsome visible
- frightful ragged
- other hyperphysical
- new dismal
- glaring and exalted
- palpable, flat
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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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