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 obstacles
Below is a list of describing words for obstacles. 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 obstacles:
- formidable tangled
- practically insurmountable
- standstill, fresh
- incidental and somewhat ludicrous
- weighty and almost insuperable
- insurmountable and unforeseen
- past multitudinous
- present insuperable
- stolid small
- legal and emotional
- past sudden
- continual and insuperable
- jokingly uneven
- unforeseen and hideous
- curious and quite insuperable
- sordid vulgar
- strong ideal
- hideous and immovable
- visible but invisible
- pedagogical and technical
- needless and artificial
- inherent and permanent
- finally insurmountable
- effectual but invisible
- bizarre, lunatic
- major short-term
- anyway technical
- obvious, gross
- purely intangible
- cruel, razor-edged
- numerous and almost insuperable
- final real
- already insuperable
- insurmountable and fatal
- early removal
- exactly insurmountable
- away formidable
- easy, unexpected
- stiff practical
- unnecessary literary
- forward middle-class
- solid and knotty
- geographical or professional
- him--trivial
- fresh and equally sacred
- many insurmountable
- many insuperable
- almost insurmountable
- insuperable technical
- jagged and stony
- natural and military
- insurmountable
- insuperable
- apparently insuperable
- apparently unsurmountable
- seemingly unsurmountable
- straightforward, well-defined
- small, maddening
- brisk, deep
- low, unseen
- vast, insuperable
- nigh insurmountable
- distant and trifling
- innumerable unexpected
- real and fairly sufficient
- easier natural
- unexpected and apparently insurmountable
- great and seemingly insurmountable
- particular, fatal
- ill-advised and shortsighted
- tangled, maddening
- obstructive imaginary
- dangerous and insurmountable
- perhaps insuperable
- sole but most formidable
- technical or hypercritical
- further insuperable
- purely technical or hypercritical
- sudden and sturdy
- irritating and wasteful
- perfidious and insolent
- stubborn and disheartening
- grave and unexpected
- imaginary legal
- monstrous and unforeseen
- many and so impassable
- certainly characteristic and ingenious
- away preliminary
- invasion--natural
- enormous and peculiar
- slight or suspicious
- resolute, many
- slight imaginary
- proper and insurmountable
- latent, undisclosed
- never insurmountable
- sole insurmountable
- present, insurmountable
- petty, superficial
- innumerable and seemingly 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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