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 odour
Below is a list of describing words for odour. 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 odour:
- nauseous fishy
- omnipresent fishy
- abhorrent fishy
- omnipresent regional
- general fishy
- pungent astringent
- faint miasmal
- acrid, husky
- excellent fragrant
- delicious moist
- ineffable, pungent
- overpoweringly strong and offensive
- faint mortal
- sweetish, earthy
- low fetid
- extremely nauseous
- overpowering spicy
- unusually ambrosial
- secret, aromatic
- altogether unpalatable
- alien but earthy
- sweet, nauseous
- faint, malign
- queer, persistent
- sweet ethereal
- rustic shrewd
- horrible and fetid
- intolerably offensive
- undefined but very slight
- delicate unimaginable
- dank rich
- vague and yet fresh
- invisible and unchanging
- sweet, virile
- acrid and warm
- unbearable, pestilential
- horrid, nauseous
- pungent clean
- pungent and heady
- disagreeably sweetish
- new acrid
- awful pestilential
- strong and offensive
- dank mucky
- faint evil
- ominous dusty
- rich pungent
- subtly spicy
- thick solvent
- strong, noxious
- dank, nauseous
- moderately offensive
- revolting fishy
- intoxicating, beloved
- fearful monastic
- peculiar mawkish
- characteristic sweetish
- sinister bitter
- rankest and most intolerable
- permanent cheesy
- faint but dreadful
- characteristically offensive
- cheesy or buttery
- hideous, pungent
- peculiar, earthy
- insufferably fetid
- disagreeably powerful
- grateful but rather heavy
- extraordinary pungent
- usual ammoniacal
- aromatic and unpleasant
- well-known pungent
- agreeable ethereal
- disagreeable or foreign
- fetid and penetrating
- pungent rancid
- unpleasant narcotic
- feeble narcotic
- often strong and disagreeable
- intensely disgusting
- horrible ammoniacal
- unpleasant penetrating
- strong, ungrateful
- slight and rather aromatic
- extremely disagreeable and penetrating
- rather powerful and persistent
- aromatic fruity
- strongly ammoniacal
- offensively powerful
- sour and fetid
- bad or fetid
- animal and chemical
- powerful but pleasant
- hideous unknown
- pleasant surgical
- sharply briny
- raw, rancid
- sweet poignant
- sticky, oppressive
- moist pungent
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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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