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 observer
Below is a list of describing words for observer. 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 observer:
- superficial foreign
- keen or careful
- utterly untrustworthy and incompetent
- intellectual and amusing
- cautious and philosophical
- suitable neutral
- careless or fastidious
- truly sharp
- shrewd contemporary
- good-natured and acute
- superficial or inexperienced
- acute and skillful
- careful aesthetic
- mythical classical
- resolutely casual
- untrustworthy and incompetent
- thoughtful and reverent
- enlightened and dispassionate
- uninitiated and careless
- practised geological
- discerning extraordinary
- ignorant or impatient
- adequately keen
- uncommonly accurate
- attentive and nice
- impartial or wise
- quiet keen
- silent and rapt
- calm and curious
- reasonably cautious
- sensitive and fair
- skillful and shrewd
- marginally astute
- shrewd and purposeful
- superior but superficial
- profoundly practical
- competent first-hand
- attentive but calm
- cold-blooded and well-trained
- travelled and laborious
- unthinking and inexperienced
- industrious and delicate
- accurate and well-known
- casual and untrained
- judicious and profoundest
- bitterest and most cynical
- often sympathetic
- keen and often sympathetic
- thoroughly conscientious and careful
- amiable and disinterested
- extraordinary competent
- diligent and religious
- acute and reliable
- uninitiated or uninterested
- competent and scientific
- careless and vulgar
- shrewd physiological
- prayerful and attentive
- casual and philosophical
- attentive and dispassionate
- trustworthy and cautious
- incessantly keen
- penetrating and quick
- calmest and shrewdest
- popular and pre-eminent
- able himalayan
- painstaking and most careful
- preternaturally gifted
- careful and acute
- fleeting animate
- truly keen
- meticulous and crafty
- reluctant would-be
- senior celestial
- incredibly scrupulous
- sensitive and reliable
- greedy and fearful
- all-knowing, wise
- long-time political
- not-so-casual
- manly middle-aged
- less crotchety
- unassisted solitary
- imaginary thoughtful
- independent and shrewd
- suspicious and closest
- dispassionate and philosophical
- perfectly impartial and intelligent
- unusually intelligent and trustworthy
- interested but passive
- original and careful
- thoughtful and suspicious
- disinterested and acute
- disinterested but keen
- casual distant
- highly skilled and acute
- skilled and acute
- honest, dispassionate
- casual or unsympathetic
- obsequious and vigilant
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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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