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 observations
Below is a list of describing words for observations. 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 observations:
- constant psychological
- clandestine visual
- casual and unplanned
- exceptionally mobile
- astronomical and nautical
- loving and facetious
- former ocular
- rare and acute
- curious and worth
- cynical and odious
- annoyingly accurate
- private depressing
- astronomical and magnetical
- ingly correct
- fewer judicial
- incredibly helpful
- --astronomical and nautical
- large and studious
- lazy and really acute
- general and somewhat superficial
- miscellaneous physiological
- severe and universal
- simultaneous meteorological
- _natural and political
- persistently modest
- quaint and first-hand
- hourly meteorological
- spuriously calm
- better astronomical
- wickedly exact
- petty unnecessary
- trite, commonplace
- extensive meteorological
- heredity--crosses--psychological
- --astronomical
- careful astronomical
- few telescopic
- exceedingly deep and weighty
- passive remote
- commonplace or trite
- magnetic and tidal
- excessively strict
- meteorological, magnetic and tidal
- [meteorological
- many and exact
- accurate chorological
- _physical and meteorological
- constant experimental
- magnetic and astronomical
- ecstasy-inducingly correct
- necessary astronomical
- peculiarly astute
- frequent celestial
- inordinately swift
- cynical, philosophic
- long and not inattentive
- discreet, indirect
- curious, analytic
- important barometrical
- stealthy and wistful
- uncorrected lunar
- practised and steady
- meteorological and magnetical
- precise past
- candid and urbane
- simply instinctive
- necessary celestial
- careful thermometric
- tidal and meteorological
- accurate and concrete
- capital miscellaneous
- sufficiently accurate and concrete
- important magnetic
- more extensive and complete
- _pathological and surgical
- acute original
- --geographical and topographical
- careful, definite
- --barometrical
- popular accidental
- meteorological and tidal
- faulty and incorrect
- barometrical and hygrometrical
- hardy, open
- casual and unconnected
- vigilant and even affectionate
- shots--general
- trite but true
- other anthropometrical
- subsequent loose
- prime-vertical
- keen and particular
- various electrochemical
- little-known but delightful
- bold and additional
- sentimental, meretricious
- general and irrelevant
- slight and fond
- rude, unscientific
- chemical and histological
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
