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 odors
Below is a list of describing words for odors. 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 odors:
- faintly fetid
- wonderful meaty
- momentary acrid
- acrid furry
- distinctive sweet-sour
- subtly indefinable
- faint but peculiarly hateful
- normally foul
- sharp, unclean
- sickening abominable
- odd and somewhat distressing
- thick, distasteful
- abominable and contagious
- necessarily delightful
- faint and unrecognizable
- delightful fragrant
- odd, fetid
- smoky animal
- gross and disagreeable
- distinct and hitherto unknown
- forth appetizing
- subtle and aromatic
- fresh and indescribable
- musky-herbal
- forth savory
- strange musky-herbal
- pungent, electrifying
- distinctive furry
- slight fetid
- peculiar and highly aromatic
- gracious and mysterious
- wild pungent
- tangy, unpleasant
- fresh complacent
- raw, fecal
- overpoweringly foul
- distinctive, sour
- sharp, dank
- peculiarly hateful
- slight but not overpowering
- pungent and highly offensive
- disagreeable, rancid
- richer woodland
- sickening and perfumed
- sour, penetrating
- infectious and cadaverous
- clean bitter
- pleasant ethereal
- sour, caustic
- oily-electrical
- innumerable unfamiliar
- metallic faint
- familiar, pungent
- peculiar but familiar
- flat, monday-morning
- keen, tasty
- unbearably attractive
- delicate but noticeable
- ripe and sickening
- stale and slightly sour
- faint but utterly disgusting
- pungent and irresistible
- distinctly foul
- unpleasant, acrid
- proper aromatic
- cloying sweetish
- pungently unpleasant
- unfamiliar but pungently unpleasant
- familiar rotten
- flat, acrid
- disagreeable, fetid
- old-time fragrant
- penetrating and spicy
- ancient and nameless
- faint sunny
- cool, earthy
- pungent and offensive
- strong and foul
- characteristic offal
- fetid feverish
- distant charred
- acrid antiseptic
- greasy, charred
- familiar blended
- definite, classic
- various savory
- sweet and unmistakable
- cold, soupy
- bitter, bright
- gassy, pungent
- enormously nostalgic
- strong and nauseous
- intolerable ammoniacal
- somewhat pervasive
- raw, familiar
- sour sulfurous
- bittersweet pervasive
- dense but exquisite
- wild, pungent
- hateful dusty
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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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