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 obstacle
Below is a list of describing words for obstacle. 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 obstacle:
- formidable tangled
- incidental and somewhat ludicrous
- insurmountable and unforeseen
- stolid small
- unforeseen and hideous
- sordid vulgar
- hideous and immovable
- pedagogical and technical
- inherent and permanent
- bizarre, lunatic
- major short-term
- obvious, gross
- cruel, razor-edged
- final real
- insurmountable and fatal
- exactly insurmountable
- insurmountable
- insuperable
- apparently unsurmountable
- straightforward, well-defined
- brisk, deep
- vast, insuperable
- distant and trifling
- real and fairly sufficient
- unexpected and apparently insurmountable
- particular, fatal
- tangled, maddening
- dangerous and insurmountable
- sole but most formidable
- further insuperable
- sudden and sturdy
- perfidious and insolent
- grave and unexpected
- monstrous and unforeseen
- certainly characteristic and ingenious
- invasion--natural
- slight or suspicious
- slight imaginary
- latent, undisclosed
- sole insurmountable
- petty, superficial
- nearly unconquerable
- vertical, solid
- new and almost insurmountable
- present, insuperable
- probably insuperable
- great and probably insuperable
- great intranational
- ultimate insurmountable
- terrible and apparently insurmountable
- seemingly small but hard
- seemingly small
- apparently insurmountable
- last defensible
- insurmountable physical
- insurmountable political
- next trifling
- unexpected and troublesome
- serious and insurmountable
- chief psychological
- almost insuperable
- lackluster little
- almost insurmountable
- six-foot vertical
- seemingly built-in
- increasingly vexing
- natural, impassable
- invisible and unidentified
- tricky but familiar
- interstellar legal
- final, huge
- typically present
- grim insurmountable
- unsurmountable and impenetrable
- insuperable religious
- surest and most permanent
- simple irresistible
- more insuperable
- impassable southern
- insolent and annoying
- superior and incomprehensible
- spirited desperate
- great, insurmountable
- latest and most difficult
- actual and formidable
- small and strange
- unforeseen and fatal
- merely canonical
- intermediate and important
- insurmountable logical
- sole fatal
- huge stupid
- formidable and unexpected
- monumental physical
- new irresistible
- great and perhaps insuperable
- immediate and insurmountable
- great unanswerable
- great insurmountable
- final insurmountable
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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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