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 obscurity
Below is a list of describing words for obscurity. 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 obscurity:
- crimsonly opaque
- chaste sylvan
- so-nearly complete
- much tumultuous
- quaint and florid
- soft doubtful
- blackest and profoundest
- complete and palpable
- downright inherent
- safe and comparatively happy
- beautiful and decent
- inhospitable and unsocial
- dingy, shapeless
- sudden and sad
- technically fossilized
- local fossilized
- grammatical or verbal
- peculiarly perfumed
- eminent and studious
- terribly prolific
- dubious dumb
- mute and smooth
- always uneasy and susceptible
- dark and almost absolute
- dim and distinct
- deep and still deeper
- relative personal
- peaceful, half-forgotten
- useful, unendurable
- gentle and economic
- intense, impenetrable
- dim and picturesque
- oblivial
- abrupt and enigmatical
- prudent and scientific
- dense and black
- decent and dull
- highest primordial
- palpable and fearful
- dense, disheartening
- callous wintry
- heavy and leaden
- profound and portentous
- indolent and inglorious
- earlier comparative
- dim, hopeless
- comfortable, blissful
- idle and insecure
- sometimes profound
- permanent nagging
- drowsy and warm
- much murky
- quiet, unnoticed
- absolute, literal
- mysterious and total
- humble but zealous
- yellow, foggy
- happy humble
- comparative personal
- absolutely total
- apparent grammatical
- almost sooty
- dusky, shadowy
- glorious dazzling
- deepest and most impenetrable
- much artful
- present wet
- hence unavoidable
- dim and perfumed
- sublime and boundless
- deep and continual
- mysterious solemn
- prosperous, well-fed
- commercial and civic
- seemingly tangible
- hot lurid
- such impenetrable
- quiet and healthful
- always uneasy
- cold and impenetrable
- painful red
- tense and expectant
- usual hazy
- certain comparative
- dark, painful
- dim, fragrant
- moist blue
- obstinately preferred
- dim and awful
- own passive
- gray, foggy
- heavy, poisonous
- certain enigmatical
- strange metaphysical
- dank airless
- gray, shadowy
- peaceful domestic
- apparently deliberate
- whole dumb
- simple, silent
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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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